LOOKING FROM LAKE AGNES DOWN ON LAKES MIRROR AND LOUISE.
THE FAIR DOMINION
A RECORD OF CANADIAN IMPRESSIONS
BY
R. E. VERNÈDE
AUTHOR OF
'THE PURSUIT OF MR. FAVIEL,' 'MERIEL OF THE MOORS,' ETC.
With 12 Illustrations in Colour
from Drawings by
CYRUS CUNEO
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO., LTD.
DRYDEN HOUSE, GERRARD STREET, W.
1911
PREFACE
You know how long ago, in the earlier-than-Victorian days, the country cousin, in order to see life, went up to the Metropolis. A terrible journey it was, but well worth the labour and anxiety. Accounts are still extant of how the bustle and noise of the streets amazed him, of how endless the houses seemed, how startled he was by the glittering, clattering folk, how innocent and countrified he felt by comparison with them. Nowadays, though the London we know is to that old London as a vast and sleepless city to a small somnolent town, the country cousin is no longer carried off his feet by a visit to it. It is not vast enough or noisy enough or new enough to impress him. Perhaps no single city ever will be again.
But Canada! Some Winnipeg school teachers who came over recently to see London, told a journalist that it seemed so quiet compared with Canadian cities. 'In our cities,' they said, 'it is impossible to escape from the noise of the streets.' ... Yet the streets and the cities are not really the things that impress one most in Canada. The amazing things are the forests and the fields, the prairies and the lakes and the mountains: all the illimitable space and the irrepressible men who are closing it in and giving it names for us to know it by.
Clearly the English country cousin who wishes to be impressed should go to Canada. It is as easy to reach as London was in the old days, and there are no highwaymen. He will come back—if he comes back—with many stories to tell his friends of the wonders he has seen and of the still more incredible things that will soon be visible. That is at least my position. I went out originally for the Bystander, which wanted its Canadian news, like all its other news, up-to-date and not too solemn, and I am indebted to the editor of that journal for permission to make use in parts of the articles I sent him for this book, in which, by the way, I have still endeavoured to avoid solemnity. For some reason or other, many writers upon Canada do fall into a solemn and portentous way of describing the country—with the result that people who know nothing of the facts say to themselves, 'This is indeed an important Dominion, but dull.' As a matter of fact, of course, Canada is a highly exciting country—from its grizzly bears to its political problems—and having spent delightful months in various parts, some well known, others, such as the French River, the Columbia Valley, and the Selkirks, very little known; riding in trains or on mountain ponies, sometimes trying to catch maskinongés (a tigerish kind of pike), sometimes trying to catch prime ministers (who cannot be described in such a general way)—I have tried to set down my impressions as incompletely as I received them. Never, I hope, have I fallen into the error of describing exactly how many salmon are canned in the Dominion, or what Sir Wilfrid Laurier should do if he really wishes to remain a great party leader. The errors I have fallen into will be obvious, and I need not run through them here.... As for criticisms—if now and then I stop to make some—if I start saying, 'Canada is a great country, nevertheless, we do some things just as well or better at home,' no Canadian need mind. Country cousins have said just that sort of thing from all time. Every cousin—even the most countrified—makes some reservations in favour of his own place; he would not be worth entertaining otherwise. If the criticisms are pointless, Canadians may say, 'What can you expect from a country cousin?' If there is something in them, they will be entitled to remark, 'This English country cousin shows some intelligence. But then he has been to Canada—the centre of things.'
CONTENTS
CHAP.
III. [LANDING IN CANADA]
IV. [A FAIRLY LONG DAY IN QUEBEC]
V. [THE ATTRACTION OF THE SAGUENAY]
VI. [STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRÉ AND A TRAVELLER'S VOW]
VII. [A HABITANT VILLAGE AND ITS NOTAIRE]
VIII. [GLIMPSES OF MONTREAL]
IX. [TORONTO, NIAGARA FALLS, AND A NEGRO PORTER]
X. [MASKINONGÉ FISHING ON THE FRENCH RIVER]
XI. [SOME SUPERFICIAL REFLECTIONS AT SUDBURY]
XII. [THROUGH THE HIGHLANDS OF ONTARIO]
XIII. [THE OLD TIMERS OF KILDONAN AND THE NEW TIMERS OF WINNIPEG]
XIV. [A PRAIRIE TOWN AND THE PRAIRIE POLICE]
XV. [IN CALGARY]
XVI. [THE AMERICANISATION QUESTION]
XVII. [AMONG THE READY-MADE FARMS]
XVIII. [INTO THE ROCKIES WITH A DEFENDER OF THE FAITH]
XXI. [THE LAKES AMONG THE CLOUDS]
XXII. [A SOLITARY RIDE INTO THE YOHO VALLEY]
XXIII. [THE FRUIT-LANDS OF LAKE WINDERMERE]
XXIV. [THE SELKIRKS—A GRIZZLY-BEAR COUNTRY]
XXV. [AN EIGHTY-MILE WALK THROUGH THE COLUMBIA VALLEY]
XXVI. [FROM GOLDEN TO THE COAST]
XXVII. [A LITTLE ABOUT VANCOUVER CITY]
XXVIII. [THE HAPPY FARMERS OF THE ISLAND]
XXIX. [A CHAT WITH THE PRIME MINISTER OF
BRITISH COLUMBIA AND A BIG FIRE AT VICTORIA]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
[LOOKING FROM LAKE AGNES DOWN ON LAKES MIRROR AND LOUISE] ... Frontispiece
[CHATEAU FRONTENAC FROM THE OLD RAMPARTS. DAY. QUEBEC]
[CHATEAU FRONTENAC AND DUFFERIN TERRACE. NIGHT. QUEBEC]
[MOUNT LEFROY. CANADIAN ROCKIES]
[THE HALT. SADDLEBACK. LAGGAN]
[LAKE LOUISE. LAGGAN. ALBERTA]
[IN THE VALLEY OF THE TEN PEAKS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS]
[THE DEVIL'S FINGERS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS]
[IN THE SELKIRKS. THE RETURN FROM THE HUNT]
THE FAIR DOMINION
CHAPTER I
THE START FROM LIVERPOOL
Canada and its wonders might lie before us, yet it was not all joy there at the Liverpool docks, where we waited our opportunity to go on board S.S. Empress of Britain. For one thing, the sun on that August day of last year was so unusually warm that standing about with a bag amongst crowds of people who were seeing other people off was hard work; for another, I had left behind me in my Hertfordshire home my bull-mastiff, forlorn ever since I had begun packing, and not a bit deceived by the bone she had been supplied with at parting. Even while she had gnawed it, she had whined. All those other people already on the great ship, the people in the bows—the emigrants—were leaving more even than a bull-mastiff: friends—for who knew how long?—their parents in England perhaps for ever. Here were thoughts to obscure the pleasure of those who were making for a new world, thoughts to sadden those who, whether by their own choice or not, were staying behind. Less than my bull-mastiff could they be either deceived or solaced. True, they might remember that this is the way a great Empire is made. We talk of the Empire often enough. But then we who talk of it are rarely those who make it or suffer for it; and perhaps we are therefore more easily consoled by a great idea than they.
Luckily going on board ship has to be a bustling business. My two companions and I, who had been promised a four-berth third-class cabin between us, had to bustle quite a lot—to different gangways from which we were rapidly sent back and into various queues, which turned out, after we had waited in them for some time, to be composed of some other class of passenger. We were extremely heated before we found ourselves in the end about to be passed up a gangway at which the medical inspection of a group of Scandinavians was at the moment going on. Scandinavian seems to be a roomy word which covers all Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Lapps; and no foreigners not coming under this category are carried by the 'Empress' boats.
The theory seems to be in regard to them that they are the only right and proper shipmates for English emigrants going to Canada. They were being pretty carefully examined all the same, men and women alike. The doctors' attention seemed to centre on their heads and eyelids. Hats were pulled off as they came level with them, and tow-coloured hair was grasped and peered into apparently with satisfactory results, for only a couple of elderly people were held back for a few minutes; and they I fancy had not passed the eye test, and were therefore not free from suspicion of having trachoma—a not uncommon North European disease supposed to cause total blindness, which is least of all to be desired in a new country. The two detained Scandinavians were re-examined and passed, after which our turn came. I think we all three felt a little uneasy in the eyelids as we advanced upon the doctor, but we need not have been anxious, for after a swift glance at us he reassured us by grinning and saying, 'There's nothing wrong with you, I should say,'—and so we passed on board. For the next hour or two we were part of a whirl of confused humanity. There is always a tendency among landsmen to become sheepish at sea, and in the steerage there were nine hundred of us, most of whom had never been at sea before. So we rushed together and got jammed down companionways and in passages which even on so big a liner as this could not hold us all abreast, and scrummed to find the numbers of our berths from the steward, and flung ourselves in masses upon our baggage, and pressed pell-mell to the sides of the ship to wave good-bye, and formed a solid tossing square saloonwards when bells rang and we thought they might mean meals.
Of course there must have been even then self-possessed passengers, who knew what they were about and only seemed to be lost with the crowd, and to be vaguely trying to muddle through. Canadians returning to their own country were conspicuous later by reason of their cool bearing and air of knowing their way about the world. And the invisible discipline of the ship that was to turn us all later into reasonable and orderly individuals was no doubt already at work. But the impression any one looking down on us that first evening would have received would have been the impression of a scurrying crowd, fancifully and variously dressed for its Atlantic voyage—clerks in pink shirts and high collars and bowler hats, peasants in smocks, women in the very latest flapping head-gear, or bareheaded and shawled, infants either terribly smart or mere bundles of old clothes.
Up on the first-class deck superior people were walking calmly about with just the right clothes and manners for such a small event as crossing the Atlantic must have been to most of them. Occasionally one of these upper folk would come to the rails, lean over and smilingly stare at us: wondering perhaps at our confusion. But then all our fortunes were embarked on the ship, and only a little part of theirs.
When I went to sleep that night on a clean straw mattress in a lower berth, with a pleasant air blowing in through the port-hole in the passage, we were, I suppose, out to sea, and the air was Atlantic air, and no longer that of the old country.
CHAPTER II
THE STEERAGE PASSAGE
Apart from its other merits the steerage has this to its credit—every one is very friendly and affable. No one required an introduction before entering into conversation, and the suspicion that we might be making the acquaintance of some doubtful and inferior person who would perhaps presume upon it later did not worry any of us. I sat at a delightful table. Some one who knew the ins and outs of a steerage passage had advised me to go in to meals with the first 'rush,' instead of waiting for the second or third. His theory was that the first relay got the pick of the food. So my two friends and I had taken care to answer the very first call to the saloon, which happened to be for high tea, and, seating ourselves at random, found that we were thereby self-condemned to take every meal in the same order—including breakfast at the unaccustomed and somewhat dispiriting hour of 7 A.M. I do not know that it greatly mattered. In the cabin next ours there were several small children, who appeared to wake and weep about 4 A.M., and either to throw themselves or be thrown out of their berths on to the floor a little later. Their lamentations then became so considerable, that we were not sorry to rise and go elsewhere.
Besides the three of us, there were at our table the following:—
(1) A Norwegian peasant. Going on to the land. Quiet and rapid in his eating.
(2) Another Norwegian peasant, also going on to the land. He must have arrived on board very hungry, and he remained so throughout the voyage. He used to help himself to butter with his egg spoon, after he had finished most of his egg with it. Moreover, he would rise and stretch a red and dusky arm all down the table, if he sighted something appetising afar off. As we had a most excellent table steward, whose waiting could not have been beaten in the first-class, we all rather resented this behaviour, and I—as his next door neighbour—was deputed to hold him courteously in his seat until the desired eatables could be passed him.
(3) A Durham miner going to a mine in northern Ontario. A cheery red-faced person. He had bought a revolver before starting for Canada, because friends had told him that they were rough sort of places up there. I afterwards stayed a night in a mining town, and the only row that I heard was caused by a young Salvation Army girl, who beat a drum violently for hours outside the bar. We advised the miner to practise with his revolver in some isolated spot, these weapons being tricky.
(4) A small shy cockney boy who was going out to his dad at Winnipeg. I don't know what his dad was, but I should think a clerk of sorts.
(5) A brass metal worker from the North. Going to a job in Peterborough. A quiet pleasant young man.
(6) A chauffeur who had also been in the Royal Engineers. Had been in the South African War, and told stories about it much more interesting than those you see in books.
(7) A horse-breaker, with whom I spent many hours learning about bits and bridles and shoes. He was the only married man among these seven. He hoped to bring his wife and family out within the year, and was not going to be happy until he did, even though the kids would have to be vaccinated, and he had most conscientious objections to this process.
All these men—even the Norwegian with his egg-spoon habits—would be, I could not help thinking, a distinct gain to any country. I fancy too that they represented the steerage generally. Of course there were other types. I remember some characteristic Londoners of the less worthy sort—gummy-faced youths in dirty clothes that had been smart. There was one in particular, whom the horse-breaker would refer to as 'that lad that goes about in what was once a soot o' clothes,' who had a perfect genius for card tricks and making music on a comb. His career in Canada, judging by criticisms passed upon him by returning Canadians, was likely to be brief and unsuccessful.
The food—to turn to what is always of considerable interest on a voyage—was good but solid. Pea soup, followed by pork chops and plum-pudding, makes an excellent dinner when you are hungry. Everybody was hungry the first day and also the last three days. In between there was a cessation of appetites. The sea was never in the least rough, but there was some slight motion on the second day out, and the majority of the nine hundred had probably never been to sea before. The strange affliction took them unawares, and they did not know how to deal with it. Where they were first seized, there they remained and were ill. The sides of the ship which appealed to more experienced travellers did not allure them. It was during this affliction that a device which had struck me as a most excellent idea upon going on board seemed in practice less good. This was a railed-in sand-pit which the paternal company had constructed between decks for the entertainment of the emigrant children. I had seen a dozen or more at a time playing in it with every manifestation of delight. Even now while they were ailing there, they did not seem to mind it.
Everywhere one went on that day of tribulation one had to walk warily.
Afterwards the sea settled down into a mill pond, and every one began to wear a cheerful and hopeful look. In the evenings, and sometimes in the afternoons as well, some of the Scandinavians would produce concertinas and violins, and the whole of them would dance their folk-dances for hours. It was extraordinary how gracefully they danced—the squat fair-haired women and the big men heavily clothed and booted. There was an attempt on the part of some of the English people to take part in these dances, but they soon realised their inferiority, and gave it up in favour of sports and concerts. The sports, though highly successful in themselves, led to a slight contretemps when the Bishop of London, who happened to be on board, came over by request to distribute the prizes. The Scandinavians, who quite wrongly thought they had been left out of the sports, seized the opportunity afforded by the bishop's address (which was concerned with our future in Canada), to form in Indian file, with a concertinist at their head, and march round and round the platform on which the bishop stood, making a deafening noise. It looked for a little as if there might be a scuffle between them and the prize-winners, but peace prevailed, though we were all prevented from hearing what was no doubt very sound advice. Apart from this, there was no horseplay to speak of until the last night but one, when a rowdy set, headed by a fat Yorkshireman, chose to throw bottles about in the dark, down in that part of the ship where about fifty men were berthed together. For this the ringleader was hauled before the captain and properly threatened.
Our concerts went with less éclat. They were held in the dining-saloon, and there were usually good audiences. It seemed however that we had only one accompanist, whose command of the piano was limited, and in any case self-consciousness invariably got the better of the performers at the last moment. Either they would not come forward at all when their turn arrived, or else, having come forward, they turned very red, wavered through a few notes and then lost their voices altogether. Our best English concertina player, a fat little Lancashire engineer, had his instrument seized with the strangest noises halfway through 'Variations on the Harmonica,' and after a manly effort to restrain them, failed and had to retire in haste. We generally bridged over these recurring gaps in the programme by singing 'Yip i addy.'
It was so fine most of the voyage, that one could be quite happy on deck doing nothing at all but resting and strolling and talking. A few of the girls skipped occasionally and some of the men boxed: there was no real zeal for deck games. The voyage was too short, and with the new life and the new world at the end of it we all wanted to find out from one another what we knew—or at least what we thought—Canada would be like. We stood in some awe of returning Canadians who talked of dollars as if they were pence, and we wondered if we should get jobs as easily as people said we should. Almost every type of worker was represented among us, and many types of people.
Chief among my own particular acquaintances made on the boat were a young lady-help from Alberta, two Russian Jews from Archangel, a Norwegian farm hand from somewhere near the Arctic circle, two miners from Ontario, and three small boys belonging to Perth, Scotland.
I do not know how the Russian Jews came to be on the boat. They had some Finnish, and I suppose slipped in with the Scandinavians. They also spoke a few words of German, which was the language we misused together. They were brothers, good-looking men with charming manners. The elder wore a frock coat and a bowler hat, and looked a romantic Shylock. The other was clothed in a smock, and was hatless. They said they had fled from the strife of Russia, and they wished particularly to know if Canada was a free country. The younger man was an ironworker and made penny puzzles in iron which, so far as I could make out, the elder brother invented. They had one puzzle with them, but it was very complicated, and I was afraid that the sale of such things in Canada might be limited, unless Canadians fancied bewildering themselves over intricate ironwork during the long winters. Still those two fugitives rolled Russian cigarettes very well too, which should earn them a living.
The Norwegian was a simple youth in a queer hat, which afterwards blew off into the sea much to his sorrow. He was very bent on acquiring the English language during the voyage, not having any of it to start with. I used to sit with him on one side and the small Perthshire boys on the other, while we translated Scottish into Norwegian and back again. The Scotch boys would inquire of me what 'hat' was in Norse, and I would point to the queer head-gear above-mentioned, and ask its owner to name its Norwegian equivalent. One of the things that stumped me—being a mere Englishman—was a question put by the smallest Perth boy: 'Whit is gollasses in Norwegian?'
It took me some time to find out what gollasses were in English, and I don't know how to spell them now.
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.
'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.
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.
That is why, since the position of French Canadians in Canadian politics will some day be of the greatest importance, we ought all to be thankful for the existence of Mr. Bourassa. Mr. Bourassa is represented—by his opponents—as the violent leader of a small faction of French Canadians, as a trial to moderate men of all sorts, including the majority of his own French-Canadian fellow-citizens. All this is very true. In Canadian politics, as they stand at present, Mr. Bourassa stands for just that and very little more. Politically he is an extremist and a nuisance. But disregarding for a moment immediate practical politics, Mr. Bourassa stands for much more than that—stands indeed for the real essence of French Canada. He is the French Canadian in action, shouting on the house-tops what most of them prefer to dream of by the fire-side, insisting upon bringing forward ideas which the others would leave to be brought forward by chance or in the lapse of time.
He has been called the Parnell of Canada, but these international metaphors are generally calculated to mislead. The most that Parnell ever demanded was Home Rule for Ireland—that small part of Great Britain, that fraction of the Empire. Mr. Bourassa does not only want Home Rule for Quebec. He wants it for Canada; only the Canada he sees thus self-ruling is a Canada permeated by French Canadianism. If Parnell had wanted Home Rule, so that England, Scotland, and Wales might be ruled from Dublin, he would have attained to something of the completeness of Mr. Bourassa's policy. Mr. Bradley, whose book on Canada in the Twentieth Century is as complete as any one book on Canada could be, and as up-to-date as any—allowing for the fact that Canada changes yearly—declared in in it, some years ago, that the French Canadians realised that for them to populate the North-West was a dream to be given up. It may be a dream, but I doubt if it is given up: and the dreams of a population more prolific than any other on the face of the earth may some day become realities. What is against these dreams? The influx of English immigrants? The rush for the land of American farmers? But these are only temporary obstacles. The Americans may go back again. They often do. The English immigrants are largely unmarried young men, and there are no women in the West. They are making ready the land, but the inheritors of it have yet to appear. It is not strange if Mr. Bourassa sees those inheritors among his own people—only it is not yet their time, not for many years yet—not for so many years yet that it seems almost unpractical and absurd to look forward to it. Even such a faith as that which Mr. Bourassa has confessed to in regard to the Eastern provinces—Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick—that 'In fifteen years they will have become French in language and Roman Catholic in faith,' seems highly unpractical. Ontario is not likely to become Roman Catholic any faster than Ulster. But on the other hand it will only increase in its anti-Frenchness and its anti-Roman Catholicism in so far as it is upheld and influenced by Imperialism. Imperialism to Mr. Bourassa is that bogey which goes about linking up all those small non-conforming, hustling, militant and materialistic communities which unaided would come into the Catholic French-Canadian fold. It is that odious system which prevents other nations within the Empire—such as French Canada—from developing along their own natural lines. It is something which easily causes Mr. Bourassa to forget that England and Englishmen—representing a distant sovereignty which keeps the world's peace—have been a boon and a blessing to French Canadians rather than otherwise; and causes him to remember that they may in a moment become an imminent sovereignty—imposing conscription, war, chapels (things that the Ontarian takes to like a duck to water) upon the whole Canadian community. Such impositions would not only strengthen the non-French Canadians, and ruin the natural progress-to-power of the French Canadians; but they would topple down like a house of cards those splendid dreams which might in a French-Canadianised Canada become realities. What dreams? Rome shifted to Montreal for one, and the Vatican gardens of the future sweeping down to the St. Lawrence. The whole vast wealth of the Dominion diverted to the carrying out of those traditions which are neither French nor English but Canadian ... started four hundred years before by the captains and the priests, voyageurs and martyrs, who in an age of unbelief went forth in response to miraculous signs for the furtherance of the glory of God.
CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC AND DUFFERIN TERRACE. NIGHT. QUEBEC.
I said that Quebec was full of memories. It is well to remember that most of these are French-Canadian memories. The Englishman, at home or touring, thinks most naturally of Wolfe in connection with Quebec, and thinks with pride how that fight on the Plains of Abraham marked, in Major Wood's words, 'three of the mightiest epochs of modern times—the death of Greater France, the coming of age of Greater Britain, and the birth of the United States.' The splendid daring climb of the English army, the romantic fevered valour of its general, the suddenness and completeness of the reversal of positions, unite to make us think that never was a more glorious event, or one better calculated to appeal to men of the New World. But do not let us forget that for French Canadians—great event as it was, severing their allegiance to France for ever on the one hand, leaving them free men as never before on the other—it was only one event in a new world that was already for them (but not for us) three hundred years old. 'Here Wolfe fell.' But here also, long before Wolfe fell, Champlain stood, and French captains led valiant men on expeditions against strange insidious foes, and the Cross was carried onwards by the priests, and amid mystic voices and divinations, and slaughterings and endurances, the faith prevailed and the character of the people was formed. They have no hankering for France—these people to whom Wolfe's battle seems but one out of many. France, they think, has forsaken the Church. But they are French still—these people—and amazingly conservative in their customs and their creed. We may tell them that England—which sent out Wolfe—has given them material prosperity, equality under the law, the means of justice. They will reply, or rather they will silently think, and only an occasional Nationalist will dare to say:—
'We owe nothing to Great Britain. England did not take Canada for love, or to plant the Cross of religion as the French did, but in order to plant their trading posts and make money.'
Gratitude is not a virtue nations take pride in possessing; they are indeed seldom nations until they have forgotten to be grateful. I suppose French Canadians are on their way to forgetting to be grateful to England for what she did in times past, but it is not because they have any real quarrel with England, or desire to injure her. Merely because they feel that from England exudes that Imperialism which appeals in no way from the past, and menaces, they think, their future.
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.
The lodges Champlain saw belonged to an Algonquin horde, 'Denizens of surrounding wilds, and gatherers of their only harvest—skins of the moose, cariboo, and bear; fur of the beaver, marten, otter, fox, wild cat, and lynx.'
Other days, other harvests. From the shack of the Only Real Indian I saw one stout tourist issue forth (a Chicago pork-packer he must have been, if persons ever correspond to their professions), laden with three toy bows and arrows, as many miniature canoes, and what appeared to be a couple of patchwork bedspreads. That the descendant of braves should live by making patchwork bedspreads seemed too much, even though I had given up as illusions the Red Indians of my boyhood. Far rather would I at that moment have seen the stout tourist come forth, either scalpless himself, or dangling at his ample belt the raven locks of the Only Real Indian.
In the night we went on to Chicoutimi, but saw nothing of that, being asleep. We had sung songs, American songs—'John Brown's Body,' 'Marching through Georgia,' etc., till a late hour of the night; and in any case the bracing river air would have insured sleep. Only in the morning as we came down the Saguenay again did I wake to its beauty and strangeness. Men have learnt to tunnel through rocks at last, but the Saguenay learnt this art for itself thousands of years ago. A wide water tunnel through the sheer rock, a roofless tunnel, open to the sky, that is the Saguenay—most magnificent at the point where Cap Trinité looms up, a wall of darkness fifteen hundred feet high.
It is a curious fact that famous landscapes always produce a remarkable frivolity in the human tourist visiting them. Perhaps it is man's instinct to assert himself against nature. When the boat draws opposite Cap Trinité, stewards produce buckets of stones and passengers are invited to try and hit the Cap with the stones from impossible distances. I do not know that it greatly added to the pleasure of the trip, but we all tried to hit the cliff with the stones and most of us failed, and had to content ourselves with drawing echoes from it. After that we went on, and some of the white whales which are characteristic of the Saguenay began to appear, and experienced travellers explained that they were not really white whales but a sort of white porpoise. Once again, as we passed it, Tadousac was invisible, but this time because a white fog had wrapped it round. So silently we turned out of the Saguenay into the St. Lawrence. I think the silence of the Saguenay was what had most impressed me. Not very long before I had steamed down the Hoogly where by day the kites wheel and shriek overhead, and the air buzzes with insects' sounds, and all night the jackals scream—a noisy river, full of treacherous sandbanks, its shores green with the bright poisonous green of the East. The Saguenay, unique as it is in many ways, seemed by the contrast of its deepness and silence, and by the fresh darkness of the rocks and trees that shut it in, to be peculiarly a river of the West. I do not know if it would have made the somewhat bald young American tired.
It is only fair to say that his attitude about Quebec is not at all characteristic of his fellow-countrymen. For most Americans, Quebec province (and still more perhaps the woods of Ontario) is becoming almost as popular a playground as Switzerland is for Englishmen. Camping out has become a great craze among Americans, and if the camping out can be done amid unspoilt natural surroundings, close to rivers where one can fish and woods where one can hunt, an ideal holiday is assured them. I forget who it was who said that much of the old American versatility and nobility had disappeared since the American boys left off whittling sticks, but in any case the desire to whittle sticks is renewed again among them, from Mr. Roosevelt downwards. And in Canada this whittling of sticks—this return to nature—can easily be accomplished. For the north is still there, unexploited. In Quebec province, fishing and hunting clubs of Quebec and Montreal have secured the rights over vast tracts of country. So vast are those tracts that one or two clubs, I was told, have not even set eyes on all the trout streams they preserve. This may be an exaggeration, though probably not a great one. There remains—especially in Ontario—much water and wood that any one may sport in unlicensed, or get access to by permission of the local hotel proprietor. Some of the Americans on the boat had been fishing in Quebec streams and told me of excellent sport they had had, so that I began to wonder why no Englishmen ever came this way. The voyage to Canada is a little further than that to Norway, but there are more fish in Canada. And there is certainly only one Saguenay in the world.
CHAPTER VI
STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRÉ AND A TRAVELLER'S VOW
Ste. Anne de Beaupré is usually referred to as the Lourdes of Canada. When a metaphor of this sort is used it usually means that the spot referred to is in some way inferior to the original. In the case of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, the inferiority is not, I believe, in the matter of the number of miracles wrought there, but in the matter of general picturesqueness. Ste. Anne de Beaupré is not nearly so picturesque as Lourdes. If you wish to palliate this fact, you say, as one writer has said, that 'The beauty of modern architecture mingles at Beaupré with the remains of a hoary past.' If you do not wish to palliate it, you say, as I do, that Ste. Anne de Beaupré is not in the least picturesque. I did not particularly care for the modern architecture, and the hoary past is not particularly in evidence. Do not suppose me to say that Beaupré has not a hoary past. Red Indians, long before the days of railroads, travelled thither to pray at the feet of Ste. Anne. Breton seamen, who belong only to tradition, promised a shrine to Ste. Anne, if she would save them from shipwreck. They erected the first chapel. The second and larger chapel was built as far back as 1657, and miracles were quite frequent from then onwards. Nevertheless, the basilica is quite new, and so is the whole appearance of the place.
I visited it in company with a French-Canadian commercial traveller. He was a great big good-looking youth with curly hair and blue eyes, and he travelled in corsets or something of that sort for a Montreal firm. I could not help thinking that many ladies would buy corsets from him or anything else whether they wanted them or not, because of his charming boyish manner and his good looks. He asked me to go to Ste. Anne de Beaupré with him. He said that he supposed that I was not a Catholic, but that did not matter. He wished to go to the good Ste. Anne, and it would be a good thing to go. He had been several times before, but he had not been for several years. He could easily take the afternoon off, and first of all we would go by the electric train to the good Ste. Anne, and then on the way back we would step off at the Falls station, and see the Montmorency Falls, and also the Zoo that is there. It would be great fun to see the Zoo. He had not seen the Zoo for several years, and the animals would be very interesting.
So we took an afternoon electric train. There are electric trains for pilgrims, of whom a hundred thousand at least are said to visit the shrine yearly, and there are also electric trains for tourists. We took a tourist train, and having secured one of the little handbooks supplied by the electric company, had the gratification of knowing that even if the car was pretty full it was, so the company claimed, run at a greater rate of speed than any other electric service.
At times in Canada I found myself getting very slack in attempting descriptions of things simply because some company that had rights of transport over the particular district had, so to speak, thrust into my hand some pamphlet in which all the description was done for me. Thus it was in the case of the district line between Quebec and Ste. Anne de Beaupré. 'It is difficult,' I read in the electric company's handbook which we had secured, 'to describe in words the dainty beauty of the scenery along this route.'
'That is a nuisance,' I said to my companion, 'because words are the only things I could describe it in.'
'It is much better to smoke,' said he.
So we smoked; and now I tell you straight out of that illogical pamphlet, that 'The route from Quebec to Ste. Anne may be compared to a splendid panorama. There are shady woodlands and green pastures, undulating hills and sparkling rivers, whose banks are lined with pretty villages, the tinned spires of the parish churches rising above the rest of the houses, sparkling in the sun.' There, a little ungrammatically, you have the scene 'to which,' adds my pamphlet, 'the Falls of Montmorency river add a touch of grandeur.' Ste. Anne de Beaupré itself is twenty-one miles from Quebec. We went straight from the station into the church, where the first thing to catch the eye are the votive offerings and particularly the crutches, walking-sticks, and other appliances left there by pilgrims who, having been cured of their infirmities by miracle, had no further use for these material aids. It is difficult to arrange such things in any way that can be called artistic, and since the general effect is nothing but ugly it might be wise for the church officials also to dispense with such material aids to faith. Apart from these the most striking object is the miraculous statue. It stands on a pedestal ten feet high and twelve feet from the communion rails. The pedestal was the gift of a New York lady, the statue itself was presented by a Belgian family. At the foot of it many people were kneeling. A mass was being said and the church was very full, and every time a petitioner got up from his knees from the feet of the statue another moved down the aisle and took his or her place. I suppose we were in the church fully half an hour before my companion found an opportunity to go and kneel at the feet of the good Ste. Anne, and having watched him there, I got up from my place and went out into the village. It was rather a depressing village, full of small hotels and restaurants and shops stocked with miraculous souvenirs. I suppose more rubbish is sold in this line than in any other. After inspecting a variety of it, I bought a bottle of cider and a local cigar and sat on a fence smoking until my friend reappeared. He came out most subdued and grave—not in the least the boisterous person who had gone in—and said we would now go back. As we had to wait half an hour for a returning train, I suggested that we should go and have some more cider, but he said no, he would rather drink from the holy spring. 'Although this water,' said my pamphlet, 'has always been known to be there, it is only within the last thirty or thirty-five years that the pilgrims began to make a pious use of it. What particular occasion gave rise to this confidence, or when this practice first spread among the people, cannot be positively asserted. However it may be, it is undeniable that faith in the water from the fountain has become general, and the use of it, from motives of devotion, often produces effects of a marvellous nature.' Unfortunately, the fountain was not working, owing, I expect, to the water having got low in the dry weather, and my friend had to go without his drink. He said, however, that it did not matter, and remained in a grave, aloof state all the way back in the train as far as the Falls station, and indeed till we got to the Zoo in the Kent house grounds. There, the exertion of trying to get the beavers to cease working and come out and show themselves to me—an exertion finally crowned with success, for the fat, furry, silent creatures came out and sat on a log for us—livened him up a bit. But he fell into a muse again in front of the cage containing the timber wolf, and remained there so long that I was almost overcome by the smell of this ferocious animal. I got him away at last, and I do not think he spoke after that until we got to Quebec and were walking from the station to our inn.
'I have made a vow,' he then said suddenly.
'What sort of vow?' I inquired.
'I made it this afternoon,' he said, 'to the good Ste. Anne—never any more to drink whisky.'
'It's not a bad vow to have made,' I said.
'No,' he said seriously, 'whisky is very terrible stuff. I shall never drink it again. When I drink it it goes very quickly to my head. Soon I am tight. That will not do.'
'Much better not to drink it certainly,' I agreed.
'Yes,' he continued vehemently. 'I am married. You did not guess that perhaps? Also it is only recently that I have gone "on the road." If the company I work for hears that I go about and get tight, I shall at once be fired. So I shall not drink any more whisky. Never. That is why I made the vow to the good Ste. Anne.'
We walked in silence the rest of the way to the inn, and I reflected on the nature of vows. It seemed very possible that a vow like this might easily be a help to my companion. He was obviously not what is called a strong character. It is strange how often a charm of manner goes with a weakness of the will. And commercial travelling—particularly perhaps in Canada—lays a man open to the temptations of drink. If he went on drinking, it would probably mean the ruin of the young girl he had married. Only one has always the feeling that a vow is only a partial aid to keeping upright, just as a stick is to walking. A man may lean too heavily on either. Moreover, the making of a vow, while it may strengthen a man temporarily in one direction tends to leave him unbalanced in other directions. It makes him feel so strong perhaps in one part of him that he forgets other parts where he is weak. I rather think that the last part of these somewhat superficial reflections upon vows occurred to me later in the evening, and not as we were walking home. We had had supper by that time, and my companion had drunk a good deal of water during the meal—a beverage, by the way, which is not particularly safe either here or in any other Canadian town. At times he had been depressed by it, at times elevated. After we had smoked together and he had grown more and more restless, he jumped up and said:
'Let us go out for a walk.'
'Where to?' I asked.
'Oh, up on to the terrace,' he said. 'I tell you,' he went on excitedly, 'where I will take you. There is a special place up there that I know very well. It is where one meets the girls. We will go there to-night and meet the girls.'
Really, I could have given a very good exposition of the temptation offered by vows at that moment when he suggested this Sentimental Journey.
CHAPTER VII
A HABITANT VILLAGE AND ITS NOTAIRE
'Il trotte bien.'
The second time I made use of this simple compliment I was again being driven by a French Canadian, and again it was on an extraordinarily bad road. But the vehicle was a sulky, and the road was a country road—about halfway between Quebec and Montreal. I had been already two days in the Habitant country which the ordinary Englishman misses. Tourists in particular will go through French Canada too fast. Their first stop after Quebec is Montreal, and the guide-books help them to believe that they have lost nothing. It may be that they do lose nothing in the way of spectacular views or big hotels, but on the other hand they have undoubtedly lost the peaceful charm of many a Laurentian village, and they have seen nothing at all of the life of the French-Canadian farmer. That is a pity for the English tourist, because they too, the Habitants, belong to the Empire, and we ought to know them for what they are apart from their politics—courteous, solid, essentially prudent folk, often well to do, but with no disposition to make a show of themselves.
I had spent my two days at the villa of a most hospitable French lady, in one of the older villages on the St. Lawrence. It was not exactly a beautiful village—rather ramshackle in fact—but remarkably peaceful, and the great smooth river running by must give it a perennial charm, such as comes from having the sea near. I had missed my train going from that village, and had passed the time by taking lunch at a little inn near the station. It was Friday, and the landlord gave me pike and eggs for lunch. I had seen my pike and several others lying in a sandy ditch near, passing a sort of amphibious life in it, until Friday and a guest should make it necessary for one of them to go into the frying pan. The landlord came and chatted with me while I had lunch, and was grieved to find that I was not a Catholic. I was English, but not Catholic? I said that was so, and he shook his head sorrowfully. But there were Catholics in England, he asked a little later. I said, Oh yes, certainly. Many? I said that there must be a good many, but I could not tell him the exact numbers. Would a tenth of the English at least be Catholics, he next demanded? I said I thought at least that number, but I left him, I fear, a disappointed man. He had hoped more from England than that, and even my strenuous praise of the fried pike did not draw a smile from him.
My compliment about the horse drawing the sulky—to go back to that drive, obtained a better response. The driver replied in the French tongue: 'Monsieur, he trots very well, particularly in considering that he has the age of twenty-eight years.'
I said that this was wonderful, and the driver replied that it was, but that in French Canada such wonders did happen. He was intensely patriotic, and this made the drive more interesting. He was all for French-Canadian things, excepting, I think, the roads, which were indeed nothing but ruts, some of the ruts being less deep than the others, and being selected accordingly for the greater convenience of our ancient steed. I liked his patriotism. It was at once so genuine and so complete. For example, when I said that I had not seen any Jersey cows on the farms we had passed, the driver said: 'No. The cow of Jersey is a good cow and gives much milk. But the Canadian cow is a better cow and gives still more milk.' I was unable to make out what the prevailing milch-cow was in that part. Canada has, I believe, begun to swear by the Holstein, but this can hardly as yet be claimed as the Canadian cow. Still it passed the time very pleasantly to have my driver so enthusiastic, and of what should a man speak well, if not of his own country? He articulated his French very slowly and distinctly, so that I was able to understand him more easily than I should have understood a European Frenchman. I was surprised at this, because one is usually told that French Canadians talk so queerly that they are very hard to follow. Perhaps my obvious inferiority in the language caused those Habitants I met to adapt themselves to my necessity. I can only say that from a few days' experience of conversation with all sorts and conditions, I carried away the impression that French-Canadian was a very clear and easy language. As for the country, I should call it serene and spacious in aspect rather than fine. The farmhouses are pleasant enough and comfortable within, but their immediate surroundings are apt to be untidy. Very seldom of course does one see a flower garden, and vegetables do not make amends for the lack of flowers. On the other hand, the tobacco patch that is so frequently to be seen in the neighbourhood of the small farms is pleasant to look at, especially for one who thinks much of smoke. There is not much satisfaction to the eye in the small wired fields, nor would either the farming or the soil startle an English farmer. I think that the maple woods are the one thing that he would regard with real envy.
Nevertheless, no one would have denied that it was a really pretty village, to which my driver brought me at last in the sulky. It was built all round an old church in a sort of dell, behind which the land rose steeply to a wood of maples. I had been given an introduction to the curé, and we drove to his house by the church, only to be told by the sexton (I think it was the sexton) that Monsieur le Curé had, much to his regret, been called to Quebec, but had begged that I would go over to the notaire, who would be pleased to show me everything that was to be seen. We went to the notaire. I think he was the postmaster too—at any rate he lived in the post office, and a very kindly old gentleman he was. I do not know one I have liked more on so short an acquaintance, though he did start by giving me Canadian wine to drink. It was a sort of port or sherry—or both mixed—and was made, I think he said, in Montreal. It had the genuine oily taste, but also a smack of vinegar. That in itself would not have mattered so much, if the notaire had not said it was best drunk with a little water, and provided me with water from a saline spring which had its source in his backyard. These saline springs seem not uncommon in Canada, and must be considered as a distinct asset. But not mixed with port. Some local tobacco which was very good, as indeed much of the tobacco grown in Quebec province seems to be, took the taste away, and after that the notaire proposed that he should take me out to see one of the huts where they boil down the maple water in the early spring. He told me that my own horse and driver should rest, and that we should go on the carriage of Monsieur Blanc which was, it appeared, already in waiting, together with Monsieur Blanc himself. Monsieur Blanc was the local miller, and solely for the purpose of showing the village to a stranger from England he had put himself to all this trouble. After we had all bowed to one another and exchanged compliments, we started for the maple wood, and all the way the notaire explained to me the economy of the village. It appeared that the farms round averaged eighty acres of arable land, and a man and his son would work one of that size. Each farmer would also have rights of grazing on pasture land which was held in common—not to mention his piece of maple wood. All the farmers belonged to a co-operative farmers' society, which saved much when purchasing seeds, implements, and so forth. The notaire himself was secretary of this society. I believe he was also secretary of pretty well everything that mattered, and might be regarded as the business uncle of the parish in which the curé was spiritual father. As we drove along, avoiding roads as much as possible, because the fields were so much more level, he greeted everybody and everybody greeted him, stopping their field work for the purpose. Jules left hay-making to show us the shortest cut to the nearest hut; Antoine fetched the key. It was a tiny wooden shack, the one we inspected—standing in the middle of the trees—with just room in it for the heating apparatus and the boilers to boil the maple water in. The cups which are attached to the trees in the early spring, when the sap begins to run—the tapping is done high up—hung along the wooden walls. The notaire explained the whole process to me. In the spring, when all is sleet and slush and nothing can be done on the farm, the farmer and perhaps his wife come up into the wood, and tap the trees and boil the water up until the syrup is formed. It takes them days, very cold days, and they camp out in the hut, though it hardly seemed possible that there should be room for them. But it is all very healthy and pleasant, and they drink so much of the syrup, while they are working, that they usually go back to their farms very 'fat and salubrious.' So the notaire said, and he also assured me that seven years before another English visitor who spoke French very badly (he put it much more politely than that though) had come to the village in the spring, and slept in one of the huts for days, and helped make the sugar and enjoyed himself thoroughly. I told the notaire I could quite believe it and wished I had come in the spring too. I am not sure that I shall not go back in the spring some day, for the simplicity of the place was fascinating, even though the railway had come closer, and land had doubled in value, and the farmers were more scientific than they used to be and made more money, though even so—as the notaire earnestly declared—they would would never spend it on show. I remarked that the notaire, even while he was recounting these modern innovations, such as wealth, was not carried away by the glory of them as a Westerner would be. He took a simple pride in the fact that the village marched forward, but he was prouder still that it remained modest. And when we got back to the post office, he told me that what he liked best was the simplicity of it all. People used to ask him sometimes why he who spoke English and Latin and Greek, for he had been five years at college, qualifying to become a notaire, should be content to live in such a small out-of-the-way place, instead of setting up in Quebec or Montreal. They could not understand that to be one's own master, and not to be rushed hither and thither at the beck of clients, contented him, especially in a place where the farmers looked upon him as their friend, and he could play the organ in the village church. He made me understand it very well, even though his English was rusty (for I think the syrup-making Englishman had been the last he had talked with), and he had a scholarly dislike to using any but the right word, and he would sometimes bring up a dozen wrong ones and reject them, before our united efforts found the only one that conveyed his precise meaning.
I think I understood, and many times on the way back, seated behind the twenty-eight year-old horse, I said to myself, that altogether the notaire was a very fine old gentleman, and if there were many such to be found in the French Canadian villages, I hoped they would not change too soon. To make the money circulate—after the fashion of the Toronto drummer—is a virtue no doubt; but courtesy and simplicity and prudence are also virtues that not the greatest country that is yet to come will find itself able to dispense with.
CHAPTER VIII
GLIMPSES OF MONTREAL
Just as a man who knows mountains can in a little time describe the character of a mountain that is new to him, so a man who knows the country in general will soon find himself becoming acquainted with new country. It is not so with cities. Only a long residence in it will reveal the character of a city. I suppose that is because man is more subtle than nature. A clay land is always a clay land; it produces the same crops, the same weeds, the same men. But who will undertake to say what a city on a clay land produces? Only the man who has long been familiar with the particular city, and he probably will not even be aware that it stands on clay.
This is preparatory to saying that being a stranger to Montreal, I did not find out much about it in the few days I was there, and I will not pretend that I did. It is, I suppose, architecturally, far the most beautiful city in the Dominion, and indeed in the Western Hemisphere, and for that very reason appears less strange to European eyes than most other Canadian towns. I would not suggest that all European towns are architecturally beautiful, or that Montreal is anything but Canadian inwardly. Superficially it looks like some fine French town. It also smells French.
'But them thereon didst only breathe
And sentst it back to me,
Since when it blows and smells, I swear,
Not of itself but thee.'
Thus England might address France on the subject of Montreal, though indeed France did more than breathe on Montreal. I would not be taken to suggest that the smell is a malodorous one—merely French. You get just that smell in summer in any French town from Rouen to Marseilles, and it is probably due to nothing but the sun being at the right temperature to bring out the mingled scent of omelettes and road grit, cigarettes, apéritifs, and washing in sufficient strength to attract the sensitive British nose. As for Montreal's French appearance—the city is by all accounts strictly divided into a French East-end and an English West-end, St. Laurent being the dividing line. But when I passed west of St. Laurent, and hundreds of French men and French women and French children continued to file past me, and I asked my way many times in English and was not understood, I began to doubt the reality of that dividing line. It seems a pity that there should be one, but there is of course, and it runs through Canada as well as Montreal. Race and religion and language combine to keep that line marked out, and it only becomes faint in business quarters.
The time has gone by for great commercial undertakings to be conducted by means of gesticulations or by the aid of an interpreter. Master and man must speak the same language, at any rate outwardly. Therefore all clerks learn English, which is also American; and I take it that statistics, if they were kept, would show many more French Canadians speaking English every year—whatever they may be thinking.
So commerce, long the butt of moralists, takes its part among the moral influences of the world. Already writers like Mr. Angell have begun to assure us that it alone—by reason of its enormous and far-reaching interests—can keep international war at a distance: here is an example of how it increases peace within a nation. In the end, perhaps, Mammon himself may appear, purged of his grossness upon the canonical list—St. Mammon!
Montreal has, so I am told, sixty-four millionaires—real, not dollar millionaires; self-made, not descended millionaires; strenuous, not idle millionaires. Most of them live in Sherbrooke Street, or near it, on the way up to the Mountain. It is a fine wide road with an extraordinary variety of houses in it. You cannot point to any one house and say this is the sort of house a millionaire builds, for the next one is quite different, and so is the next and the next. It is natural that Canadians should be more original in their house-building than our millionaires. They are more original men altogether. They have made their money in a more original way, and when they have made it, they have to think out original methods of spending it—unlike ours, who find the etiquette of it all ready made for them, and a practised set of people who want nothing more than to be able to help millionaires scatter their money in the only correct and fashionable way. You have to think everything out for yourself in Canada, even to the spending of your money. That is, if you have the money in large quantities. For the ordinary person the inherent slipperiness of the dollar suffices, and he will find that it will circulate itself without his worrying. The diversity of house-building, such as may be found in Sherbrooke Street, should give encouragement to Canadian architects, but does, as a matter of fact, let in the American architects as well. I could not feel that they had altogether succeeded in this street—certainly not half so well as they have succeeded in some of the business buildings, especially the interior of the Bank of Montreal—but that is not surprising. Architects must have their motives, and the reasons that went to the building of some of the stately private houses of Europe have ceased to exist now. The most that a man can demand from his house—certainly in Canada—is that it shall be luxurious. Nobody is going to keep retainers there. The three hundred servants even that went to make up the household of an Elizabethan nobleman could not be had in Canada either for love or money. Those three hundred serve in the bank or the shops—not in the houses—and it is there that the big man works also. Slowly we come to the right proportions of things; nor am I suggesting that the private houses of the Canadian millionaires are in the least lacking in size. They are as large as they need be, if not larger; and where they did not altogether succeed was, I thought, in the attempt made with some of them to achieve importance by rococo effects. The road itself, curiously enough, was rather bad and rutty; I began to think, seeing it, that there is some strange influence at work in French Canada which prevents a road from ever being first-rate. It may be that since roads there are only needed in summer, for a half year instead of a whole one, the care and affection we lavish upon them is not necessary. The good snow comes and turns Sherbrooke Street into a sleigh-bearing thoroughfare only comparable with those of St. Petersburg. The ruts are drifted up and vanish—why bother about them? It is a good enough explanation. If another is needed, it may be that there is money to be made—by those in charge of the keeping up of the roads—by the simple method of not keeping them up.
Montreal has slums as well as Sherbrooke Street, which seems to show that sixty-four millionaires are no real guarantee of a city's perfectness. I heard about those slums from the editor of one of Montreal's leading newspapers. The subject arose out of a question I put him as to whether he could tell me the difference between Conservatives and Liberals in Canada. Some people maintain that the difference even in England is so slight as to be unreal. To a Canadian who is not much of a politician (but is, of course, either a Liberal or a Conservative), the question amounts to being a catch question. He has to think for a long time before he answers. This editor, who was a Liberal, took it quite coolly.
'Oh,' he said, 'Liberals here are very much like Liberals in the old country; we stand for Social Reform and the interests of the People.'
Then he told me about the slums in Montreal. But for these I should have felt doubtful about the parallel, even though it was drawn by so eminent an authority as the editor of a newspaper. For, naturally, at present in most parts of Canada there is no People (with our own English capital P) to stand for, just as there are no peers and no Constitution. Where there are slums, there may be a People to be represented. The more is the pity that there should be slums. Why does Montreal possess them? Largely, I suppose, for the reason that any very great city possesses them. There are landlords who can make money out of them, there are people so poor that they will live in them; and their poverty is accounted for by the fact that cities draw the destitute as the moon the tides. It seems against reason that Canada, capable of absorbing hundreds of thousands of immigrants, calling for them to be absorbed, so long as they are able men, should have any destitute to be drawn to the cities; but it has to be remembered that no immigration laws can really prevent a percentage of incapables arriving. They may not be incapables as such, but they are incapables on the land, which is indeed in Canada endlessly absorbent, but absorbent only of those who have in them in some way the land-spirit. To expect the land to take on hordes of the city-bred without ever failing is to dream. It would be easier for the sea to swallow men clothed in cork jackets. Some are bound to be rejected, and they turn to the cities. But the cities of a New World cannot absorb indefinite numbers of men; London or Glasgow cannot. The work is not there for them—not for all of them.
The Canadian winter also has to be remembered as a factor driving men to cities like Montreal. Even good men on the land cannot always during the winter obtain work on the farms; or think that the little they can make there is not worth while. So they, too, make for the cities, not always to their own improving. This problem of the Canadian winter is one that has still to be reckoned with, and no doubt the Canadians will solve it in due course—perhaps by some extension of the Russian methods whereby the peasant of the summer becomes the handicraftsman of the winter. It is not the winter itself that is at fault in Canada, as used to be thought; it is the method of dealing with it. The Canadian may not mind the hard, cold months—may even boast of them, but he cannot ignore them. And the solution of the winter problem seems to be that though Canada is marked out as an agricultural country, it must also equally become a manufacturing one, so that men—who cannot hibernate like dormice—may be able to work the year through. The whitest nation is that nation whose leisure is got by choice not by compulsion.
There must be local reasons, too, for Montreal slums, but these a visitor is not happy in describing. Municipal mismanagement is unfortunately not exclusive to Europe; and my editor gave me examples of it in Montreal which were impressive without being novel.
He also pointed out that there were forty thousand Jews in Montreal, as though that might have something to do with her slums. Others point out that the Catholic Church, which believes that the poor must be always with us, is supreme in Montreal; poverty and the faith, they say, go always together. I think it is truest to argue that, while all these things are in their degree contributory, it is not fair to fix on any one of them as the chief cause of the ill. One thing is certain. Montreal's slums are not typical of Canada, but of a great city. No great city has as yet found itself completely, and the greater it is, the less soluble are its problems of poverty. It may be that they can be resolved only by the great cities ceasing to exist in the form we know them.
Meanwhile it looks as though the welfare of employees is not being neglected by the leading directors of industry. Take, for example, the Angus Shops, which are larger than any other engineering shops in the world. Here are built these huge houses of cranks and pistons, the railway engines of the Canadian Pacific, that hustle one from end to end of the Dominion; here also are turned out all else that appertains to the biggest railway company in existence. In these shops a system has been introduced which might be called a Bourneville system, only Canadianised. The management refers to it as Welfare Work, and it consists mainly in certain methods whereby the men can obtain good food—while they are working—at low prices, apprentices are helped to an education, the cost of 'holiday homes' is defrayed, and so on. Very sensibly the management admits the system to be a part of a business plan, which it finds remunerative. The idea that beneficence plays a leading part in it is almost scouted; indeed it would not be easy to persuade Canadian working-men that their bosses were doing things from charity. I went over the shops, and found them built on a vast and airy scale. Not being an engineering sort of person, I usually feel, when I invade a machinery place, like some unfortunate beetle that has strayed into a beehive, and may at any moment be attacked by the busy and alarming creatures that are buzzing about there. As I watched the huge engines, swung like bags of feathers from the roof, some black demon would heave showers of sparks at me, and when I started back, another would come raiding out with red-hot tongs. I admired respectfully. But I am one of those who can enjoy my honey just as much without knowing just how it was made. Still, here was a big bit of Montreal, and what miles of French houses with green shutters one drove past to get to it!
It would be absurd to suggest that poverty or slums are conspicuous things in Montreal. The average tourist will see none of them, but only many beautiful things—from the Bank of Montreal to the Cathedral, from the Lachine Rapids to the Mountain. I will not describe shooting the Rapids, it has been so often done. I wish I could describe the view from the Mountain. It is the most beautiful view of a city that can be seen. Marseilles from her hill is beautiful, so is Paris from Champigny. From neither of these, nor from any hill that I know of, is there so complete a view of so fair a city. The Mountain is wooded, and through the arches of the trees you gain a score of changing outlooks; but from the edge you see all Montreal—houses and streets and spires, each roof and gate, each chimney and window—so it seems. And beyond, the great river, and beyond, and on every side—Canada. If there were a mountain above Oxford, something like this might be seen.
It was up this wooded steep to Fletcher's field, where an altar had been set up, that the great Eucharistic procession of 1910 wound its way. I was in Montreal just before this event, for which the Montrealers had spent months preparing, and I realised a little why Montreal hopes some day to be the New Rome. The whole city was in a fervour of enthusiasm. A society had been formed for the special purpose of growing flowers to line the way along which the Cardinal-legate would walk, and gifts of money for the same purpose had been received from every part of Canada. The papers, of course, were full of every detail about Church dignitaries arriving or about to arrive. Nor were the shops behindhand. 'Eucharistic Congress! House decoration at moderate prices' was everywhere placarded; and papal flags and papal arms were to be had cheap. There were Congress sales, too, and you could buy Congress 'creations' from the dressmakers, Congress hats from the milliners, Congress boots from the bootmakers.
On the day that Cardinal Vannutelli arrived, in a dismal and violent downpour of rain, all Montreal in macintoshes was to be seen dashing for the Bonsecours wharf to offer its respectful greetings to the papal legate.
Will the Montrealers' dream of providing the New Rome ever be achieved? Who can say? Rome, though Italians may become subversive of the faith, will perhaps stand for ever. If it ceased, as the centre of the Catholic faith, Montreal might certainly claim to take its place. It is already the centre of French-Canadian Catholicism; it might become the religious centre of Canada. There is no certainty that Catholicism will persist in Canada only among the French Canadians. It seems equally possible that Rome will prevail among non-French Canadians. Both in Canada and the States her strides forward have been enormous—comparable perhaps only to the steps taken in other directions by Free Thought in Europe. Is it that Catholicism makes peculiar appeal in a new country, or that in these new countries the propagation of the faith has been great and unceasing? These are debatable questions (though undebatable, I think, is the statement that in the New World Rome has a marvellous history of things attempted splendidly and achieved without reproach). I will not debate, then, but rather return to the Mountain and ask you to picture the great Eucharistic procession moving slowly up to it—up to the altar built there in the open, under the high and clear Canadian skies—all the inhabitants of a mighty city moving with it, till the city itself is left behind and all that is low and earthly left for the moment with it. Then you will have in your mind one picture of Montreal at least not unworthy of it. It will be a picture of Montreal at its best and highest—a city of the faithful—near to their Mountain.
CHAPTER IX
TORONTO, NIAGARA FALLS, AND A NEGRO PORTER
From Montreal to Toronto is a pleasant run through a southern part of Canada. One passes orchards and woods and Smith's Falls, where bricks are made, and Peterborough, which has the largest hydraulic lift-lock in the world. The Union railway station at Toronto, when I got there, was a seething mass of people and baggage, with an occasional railway official hidden in the vortex. I spent an hour trying to put a bag into the parcel-room, and after that gave up trying. Canadians are singularly patient in matters of this kind. Laden with heavy bags, they will collect in crowds outside the small window of a parcel-room, and burdened thus will wait there for hours without a murmur, while the youth inside lounges about at his leisure. My temper has frequently been stretched to the limit in Germany when I have had to wait perhaps ten minutes for a penny stamp while the Prussian postal official behind the glass slit curled his moustaches in imitation of the Kaiser. I think the methods at that parcel-room in Toronto were even more trying. I will admit that it was Labour Day, and that Toronto was also in the throes of the World's Fair. But in a city of that size one would expect some preparation to be made for forthcoming throes. The truth seems to be that throughout Canada important events, attracting immense crowds, are brought off without any extra provision being made. Montreal managed to contain its Congress hordes pretty well, but Toronto during the World's Fair had a general air about it of sleeping six in a bed, if it slept at all. I kept coming across the same sort of thing at other places. Calgary, I remember, looked for the few days I was there like the Old Kent Road on a Saturday night, so crowded was it with people who had come in to witness the return to its native heath of a victorious football team. Regina was overrun with the Canadian bankers who, in massive formation, were touring the North-West. In one or two small places in the Rockies enormous trainloads of Canada's leading merchants, who were inspecting British Columbia with an eye to its future, were deposited for a day in passing, and caused as much confusion as the canoe-loads of savages must have done when they descended on Robinson Crusoe's island.
Labour Day is in the New World very different from what it is with us. In Canada, if you like, you may for three hundred and sixty-four days labour and do all that you have to do, but the three hundred and sixty-fifth is Labour Day, and no manner of work—except transportation—may be done that day. Transport work is necessary, because by way of observing Labour Day it is the thing to go somewhere in great multitudes, preferably by rail, and pursue the sort of pleasure that is only to be obtained by those who seek it multitudinously.
Toronto was on this occasion a chosen spot for people to rollick in. This, added to the fact that the World's Fair was also in progress, prevented me from being able to get a room for the night, though I applied at five different hotels. At the sixth, which was full of excited commercial travellers, I was granted a bed on a top landing. I did not mind so much because I was seeing Toronto in a lively state. Ordinarily, I imagine, Toronto is the least bit too decorous, not devoid of cheerfulness, but not joyous either. There is nothing Parisian about Toronto, you would say. This stands to reason, because if there is any Parisian air in Canada at all it belongs to Montreal, and Toronto would be the last place to imitate Montreal in any manner. The extraordinary rivalry that exists between the great East Canadian cities never leads to imitation. On the plains it is different. Winnipeg is the great model for all the little towns on the plains. But while Quebec resents the idea that Montreal is a much more important city than itself, and Montreal regrets that the seat of Government should be at so small a place as Ottawa, and Toronto considers Montreal ill-balanced in spite of its wealth, each of them would only consent to expand its own real superiority along its own particular lines and in its own particular manner.
Still on Labour Night Toronto was quite gay. It did not look like the Boston of Canada at all, though it has substantial grounds, I read somewhere, for making this claim. I could realise that it was entitled to make this claim if it wanted to. If one shut one's eyes to the crowds, one could feel an air of brisk sobriety permeating it; and everything that one reads about it goes to show that a brisk sobriety is what it aims at. It keeps the Sabbath, for example, most strictly, though it hustles or almost hustles the rest of the week. I should guess Toronto places briskness next to godliness, not a very bad second either. Its industries and its opulence are too well known to be worth detailing here. What struck me as most interesting about Toronto was that it seemed to represent more than any other place in Canada what we mean in England when we talk of Canadians. We do not mean the French Canadians of Quebec Province, nor the American Canadians and English public-school boys who are to be found in such numbers in Alberta and the plains. The sort of people we are thinking of are people who have been born in Canada, who have even spent generations there, but are, nevertheless, British by descent and British in tongue. There are people of this sort in other parts of Canada. The inhabitants of the Maritime Provinces are such, in spite of the fact that Mr. Bourassa has claimed that within fifteen years they will have become French in language and Roman Catholic in faith. Mr. Bourassa has made the same claim, to be sure, with regard to the inhabitants of Ontario. In the meantime, it would be truer to describe the inhabitants of Ontario as Canadians in the English sense. And Toronto is their capital. It is, of course, the home of the United Empire Loyalists who settled here when the States broke away from our rule. The temper that made any rule but England's and any liberty that was not English liberty unendurable still remains, and I think Mr. Bourassa will have his work cut out to Gallicise them. Still even the sternest traditions of loyalty do not prevent—nay, even encourage—a certain change in the character of a people.
It is probable that Ontarians are less English now than they were, just as Quebeckers are less French. Which have the right to be held more essentially Canadian may be questioned, but I repeat that when we in England talk of Canadians we have in mind a type of men to which the Ontarians correspond more than any others. It would be absurd, no doubt, to look for the English type in a metropolis like London, and perhaps it is absurd to look for the Ontarian type in a metropolis like Toronto. But it is less absurd, I think, and anyhow I did look for it there. What did I find? Well, I hope elsewhere to go cautiously and delicately into this matter of what a typical Canadian is like. Here I will only say that if you can imagine a Lowland Scot, cautious and self-possessed, outwardly resisting American exuberance and extravagance, but inwardly by slow degrees absorbing—and thereby moderating—that hustling spirit of which these things are manifestations, you have something not unlike the Canadian of Toronto. Remember that Toronto is the southern gateway of Canada. It fronts on the States. It deals with the States. Between it and the States there is constant intercourse. It pursues the same industries, following in many cases the same methods. Many American managers of men are to be found in Toronto. It is not unnatural that some of the American spirit should dwell there also, and even tend to breed there.
Now for the Fair. Fairing is a pretty old thing, and I have done a good deal of it, but fairing at Toronto struck me as being somehow new. I do not mean in the way of the exhibits one saw. They were nothing out of the way to any one who has seen the more famous exhibitions of the Old World, and the arrangements struck me as poor. The grounds by the lake are fairly extensive, but the buildings are second-rate. I thought when I saw the fruit exhibit in one of them that the whole display was little better than at a little English village flower show. But the keenness of the crowd visiting the ground! There was the novelty. They did not glimpse at things in our blasé European way, and then sink into seats to listen to the band. They did listen to the band, but that was because the band was part of the show; and they wanted to do the show, every inch of it. Whole families camped for the day on the grounds. They brought meals with them in paper bags and boxes to fortify themselves lest they should drop before they had seen everything. Not that there was any lack of smartness either. The ladies had on their best hats and frocks, and the Canadian best in these respects is very fine. But one did not suspect them, as one would have suspected ladies at the White City or the Brussels Exhibition, of being there merely to show themselves off. Their frocks were in honour of the Fair. The Fair was the thing. It was a scene of the greatest enthusiasm under a tolerably hot sun. I had been asked to note if any English firms had taken the trouble to exhibit, and I am bound to say that I saw very few. It seems a pity when one considers the sort of people who visit the Fair—not merely a crowd amusing itself for an hour or two with glancing at the exhibits, but a crowd trying to find out what there was to buy—a crowd with dollars in its pockets and plenty of dollars in its banks. I dare say there are difficulties in the way. There was not, for example, indefinite room for more exhibits, nor are Canadian manufacturers, with rumours of reduced tariffs going about, to be presumed eager to encourage competitors. Still, it seemed a pity.
I clove my way to bed that night on the top landing through a horde of keen commercial travellers joyfully discussing all the business the exhibition would bring them. Next day I went to Niagara, by steamer, across the great lake. Toronto owes at least half its greatness to the Falls, and there should be, but I do not think there is, a really big monument to their discoverer, Father Louis Hennepin. Very likely, though, the discovery of Niagara was its own reward, especially for so inquisitive a man as that friar. He has himself confessed how, in the old days, when he was only a begging friar, sent by the Superior of his Order to beg for alms at the seaport of Calais, he used, in his curiosity, to hide himself behind tavern doors and listen to the sailors within telling of their voyages, while their tobacco smoke was wafted out and made him 'very sick at the stomach.' In the end he was the first white man to see the Falls, in the winter of 1687....
They were framed in a most gorgeous sunset when I saw them on an August day. The green and white foam swooped from a mountain of clouds all grey and gold—clouds piled fantastically into the furthest sky. No one seeing them in such a light could be disappointed with them, but I would forbid any more writers to write about them. Every man should be his own poet where the greater sights of the world are concerned. On second thoughts it is permissible to read Mr. Howells on the subject, and even Dickens, provided one is never likely to see them with one's own eyes. I saw the Falls at sunset, by starlight, and in the sunrise, and I can commend them at all these times. The river that drowned Captain Webb and was crossed by Blondin on the tight-rope, though extraordinary in its way, seemed to me comparatively unbeautiful and uninteresting. Any big sea on the Atlantic or Pacific is a finer sight and grips a man harder. I like a river quiet myself. Moreover, the villas above Niagara River give the landscape a domestic air in which its mad swirl seems only like an attempt to show off malignantly.
One of my pleasantest recollections of Niagara is a conversation I had with the porter at the hotel where I stopped on the Canadian side. He was an American negro, extremely urbane and chatty. He told me that he guessed I was an Englishman. It was pretty easy, he said, to tell that. I did not feel sure whether to feel flattered or not, but I felt sure later, when he introduced me to the lift-boy—a typical little stunted anæmic street arab from one of our northern cities—with a wave of the hand and the remark, 'Thar's one of your fellow-countrymen.' Afterwards, in self-defence, I steered the conversation towards Canada, and the porter, who regarded himself as an American citizen only, told me that the Canadians were a slow, stupid people, who could not be trusted of themselves to do anything but cultivate a little land badly.
'Look at Toronto,' he said; 'do you think there'd be any hustle in that place if the Canadians had been left to themselves? No, sah. But we came along and lent them our brains and our enterprise, and I guess now it's a big fine city.'
CHAPTER X
MASKINONGÉ FISHING ON THE FRENCH RIVER
A friend, acquainted with Canada, met me in Toronto, and I told him I was tired of cities and thought of going to the Muskoka Lakes.
'What do you expect to get there?' he asked.
'Scenery,' I said—'camping, fishing. A Fenimore Cooper existence in the backwoods. Isn't it to be had there?'
'The scenery's all right,' he said, 'and you can camp out of course, and there are some fish. But if you mean you want a quiet, unconventional life——'
'I do for a few days,' I said.
'You'd better go further than the Muskoka district, then,' he said. 'It's beginning to be rather a fashionable camping-ground—quite pleasant in its way. If you care to see charming American maidens in expensive frocks falling out of canoes just on purpose to be able to change into frocks still more expensive, the Muskoka country is the place for you. If not, you had better come with me and fish for maskinongés on the French River.'
I did not know where the French River was or what maskinongés were, or how you caught them; but I said 'Yes,' being very tired of cities, and we took the night train from Toronto, and at 4.30 A.M. dropped off it on to a bridge that spanned a deep, big river. The dawn was exceedingly cold and grey.
Literally we dropped off the train, for it did not stop but only slowed down, and after us the negro porter dropped our bags and tackle. A minute later the train had vanished, and we were left alone on the bridge, staring at the rocky, wooded cliffs that rose on either bank. Rock, wood, and water indeed met the eye wherever one looked. It seemed a country where Nature had once built mountains, savage and sparsely wooded mountains in the midst of a great inland sea, then in a cataclysmal mood had dashed them to pieces in every direction. And as the boulders and splinters of boulders flew, some fell in circles and made little lakes out of the great sea; some fell in heaped cliffs and banks, between which the sea was squeezed into winding, forking streams; some fell and sank and left the sea a shallow swamp above them; some fell and stood up out of the water and became islands of dry rock. Every splinter that flew bore in some crack of it a seed of spruce or fir or birch, which grew; so that all this barren rock and waste of water became crowned with trees. I dare say any geologist could explain exactly what did happen. I am merely explaining what appears to have happened, when you look at it the first time with eyes still full of sleep.
It was the French River at which we were gazing, and it looked at this point somewhat wider than the Thames at Hammersmith. It was flat and full with a good current; and my friend made some remark about never having been given to understand, when he was at school in England, that there was such a river at all—much less that it was finer than the Thames.
'I doubt if one would find it marked on an English school map even now,' he continued.
'I don't know, I'm sure,' I replied.
'Doesn't it show how disgracefully ignorant we are of Canada?' he demanded in the hollow tones of an Imperial enthusiast.
'Yes,' I agreed. I daresay I should have agreed anyhow. It was disgraceful that we neither of us had known anything about the French River. But the reason I agreed so quickly was that, if I had not done so, he was capable of proving to me that such gross ignorance, if persisted in, will some day prove fatal to the Empire. Whereas I merely wanted breakfast. Any one who has been dropped off a train at 4.30 on a misty morning in the sort of country I have described will sympathise with me.
Luckily the dawn soon became a little less grey, and presently we beheld a wooden shack standing on a crag some quarter of a mile up stream, with a dozen canoes moored below it. Presently also—and this was more to the point—some one in the shack became aware of us standing on the bridge, and put out in an old boat fitted with a motor to fetch us. An hour later we were enjoying breakfast inside the shack, which is really a hotel of sorts, and its proprietor, Mr. Fenton, was explaining to us all about the fishing to be had on the French River. For five dollars—or nine for two persons, he would supply us with a canoe, an Indian guide, a tent, provisions, and a hundred miles or so of first-class fishing.
Now for the benefit of all benighted Englishmen who do not know the French River or Mr. Fenton of Pickerel, but would like to make their acquaintance and that of the maskinongé, let me enlarge upon my existence for the next few days.
Let me begin with Bill. Bill was our Indian guide. He was an Ojibway. Youthful, well built, reserved in manner, he paddled us on the average eight hours, cooked three meals, and set up or took down our tent in an incredibly short time every day. When either of us caught a fish, Bill laughed; when we did not, he stared into space. He laughed pretty often, for we caught quite a number of fish. It seemed unavoidable on the French River. Occasionally, in answer to questions, Bill spoke. He spoke English. Once or twice he spoke on his own account. I remember his saying that he preferred eggs to fish. I do not know how much Bill thought. Accustomed to connect such outward reserve and dignity as Bill showed with a philosophic mind, I fancied for quite a long time that Bill must think a great deal. I doubt it now. Those who have studied the Red Indian in his native haunts have discovered, I believe, that though his mind works in mysterious ways, it does work; but not quickly, or with superhuman gravity or discernment. As for that look of reserve—it indicates no more brain-work or brain-power than the look of reserve on the face of an alligator. When I read hereafter that the hero of a book has a reserved face and an imperturbable manner (he so very often has in the novels of ladies) I shall think of Bill, and be delighted. Bill was so soothing. So was the French River. It is worth an Englishman's while to know of it—worth his private as well as his Imperial while. American sportsmen seem to know it well. They come fishing up it in fair numbers earlier in the year, and they come shooting later—deer and partridge and cariboo. The partridge shooting is said to be some of the finest in Canada.
The French explorers also knew the French River, for it was by this route that they first found their way to Lake Huron when, by reason of Bill's ancestors being out on the war-path, seeking scalps, they found Lake Ontario impossible of crossing. In width it varies considerably. Sometimes it narrows to rapids, at others it broadens to over a mile across, and is divided into channels by steep islands. The scenery of it is as changeful as its channel. Now the banks are built in sheer stone, a hundred feet high; again they rise terrace by terrace, smooth as if men had made them; a little later they are nothing but a chaos of strewn rock. Sometimes the firs predominate, sometimes the birches, pale green still these latter, or yellowing in the fall. Then a splash of cherry colour or crimson shows a maple on its way to winter. There are reedy backwaters where great pike lie; and natural weirs, below which the rock bass wait for their food; the deep pools hold pickerel or catfish. Everywhere the air exhilarates, and along the wider reaches we used to meet a wind like a sea-wind that put the river in waves and set them tippling into the bows of the canoe.
For the most part we trolled, six or seven miles upstream from Pickerel landing, using an artificial minnow or feathered double spoon, which latter seemed to attract pike, bass, and pickerel, though the last, like the cat-fish, preferred a worm. However, it is a dull fish, the pickerel, hardly worth catching. Not so the cat-fish. A six-pounder of this variety can be very strenuous indeed, and the only drawback to it is, as an American we met remarked, you would have to shut your eyes before you could eat it. Certainly it is one of the most grotesque and hideous of freshwater fish, having four slimy tendrils growing from the sides of its mouth, with pig's eyes between. The bass is a fine eater. We got bass up to four pounds, and if it is not mean to mention such a matter in connection with so sporting a fish, you know that when you have landed one you have landed a glorious supper. Those suppers over the camp fire, which Bill could set roaring within three minutes—so much timber and touchwood lies everywhere—what would one not give to enjoy the like in England? In an artificial sort of way you can do so. Here one is in the wilds as they were from the beginning—except that the Indian is cooking for the white man instead of cooking the white man for fun.
What a delight it was, too, to go to bed on a couch of fir boughs, with the wind rustling through the birches, to the soothing sound of Bill, stretched at the foot of the tent, spitting gently into the night. It was a soothing sound, until I awoke one night to find that Bill had drawn the flap of the tent tight, but was still spitting—I do not know whither.
We spent four days on the French River, and our catch averaged over twelve pounds a day. It would have been much more if we had fished for every sort of fish and taken no photographs. As it was we took a good many photographs, and spent most of our time trying to lure the maskinongé. It is the king-fish of these waters—a sort of pike—but with the leaping powers of a salmon and the heart of a tiger. Bill used to madden us with tales of how the last party he had guided had landed twenty maskinongés in three days. We fished and fished, and then I, trolling with a spoon, hooked one. We saw him almost instantly take a great white leap into the sun, thirty yards from the canoe. Then Bill paddled gently for the nearest shore at which one could land him, and I played him the while with such care ... Oh, my maskinongé, never to be mine! I got him to the bank—a flat piece of rock with a kindly slope to the water. Perhaps he was not more than fifteen pounds in weight. Perhaps he was. Bill said not. But then Bill had not hooked him; and in fact it was Bill who lost him. Anyway, fifteen pounds is fifteen pounds, even if they do run to forty. Yes, it was Bill that lost him. I stick to that—though I admit that we had all been stupid enough to come out without a gaff. So it came about that, though I drew him ever so gingerly to the rock, yet—yet as Bill made a lunge at him to get him up—my maskinongé leaped once more—and broke the line!
There for a second he lay, all dazed and silvery, in the shallow water—then woke up and vanished, spoon and all!...
Bill vowed that the line was too weak; but what line would have stood it?
No matter—though I did not say 'no matter' at the time. Some day perhaps I shall go back to the French River. For fifty pounds a man could get there from England, spend three weeks in fishing, and return again to the old country—a five-weeks trip in all—and know, maybe, the best August and September of his life. Yes, I hope to go back and catch maskinongé, and listen once more to the wind in the birches, and go to sleep again to the sound of Bill spitting—for choice into the night.
CHAPTER XI
SUPERFICIAL REFLECTIONS AT SUDBURY
Coming away from the French River, we spent a night at Sudbury, which lies in the midst of 'rich deposits of nickeliferous pyrrhotite.' Had I a brain capable of appreciating nickeliferous pyrrhotite, I should have got more pleasure out of this prosperous mining town than I did. My chief recollections of it are that it was unattractive, that everybody looked prosperous in it, that trucks were shunted under my bedroom window all night long, and that the hotel proprietor forgot to wake us at the time we had requested, with the result that we got to the station breakfastless, about half an hour after the train was due to start. Luckily it was late. I do not care for missing trains at any time, but to have missed that train at Sudbury would have been singularly annoying. There was, in effect, nothing of interest in Sudbury if you were not interested in nickeliferous pyrrhotite. I know that I should not make such a remark. Humani nihil a me alienum should be every writer's motto. But it is one thing to possess a motto, another to act upon it after trucks have been shunted under one's window all night, and one stands breakfastless on a dull station very early in the morning, waiting for a train that will not come.
Let me recall what sort of humanity was about. There was a stout, middle-aged Indian guide, who told us the finest trout fishing in Canada was to be had a few miles from Sudbury. He was the most cheerful Indian I saw in Canada—really a cheerful man—creased with smiles. There were miners looking out for jobs or leaving them—mostly spitting. They were all young men. I only saw about four old men in the whole Dominion. I do not know if Canadians are shut up after a certain age, or do not grow to it, or retire like butterflies to end their days far from the ken of man. So that there was nothing surprising in there being only young men at the station. More surprising was the amount of nationalities that seemed to be represented among them. They seemed of every race and yet very alike. I suppose a miner is a miner, whatever his nationality, just as a mahout is a mahout. In the strange worlds both these kinds of experts live in, the one sort in the bowels of the earth, the other on the necks of elephants, our little international distinctions would tend to become of less importance. If a man is a miner, he may also be a Belgian or a German or a Yorkshireman—but his real country is subterranean: he is before all things a citizen of the underworld. I do not know if one would get to recognise a miner in Canada quite so easily as one gets to recognise a miner at home—for miners there shift about more than in England, and spend more time, therefore, in the upper world; which stamps men differently. Still, though tales of new finds in new countries, where wages will be almost incredibly high, constantly reach them, and tempt them forth, after all they emerge from one part of the dark earth only to plunge into another—passing the between-time above-ground magnificently; but less magnificently than their wives. The prices paid by miners' wives for their hats at some of the big stores would startle the more extravagant of our own smart set. I believe there were some lumbermen in the station too, taking their ease, but I had not then grown to know the look of a lumberjack as I did later. The chief thing about him is his magnificent complexion—enviable of women. Canada is not generous in the matter of complexions, and one usually hears that the dry winds of the winter time are accountable for making them poor, especially on the plains. The hot stoves of the shacks are a still more likely cause. Why then should the lumbermen have such incomparable skins? Partly because they are men in 'the pink of condition'—so long as they work (their condition out of it is best realised by a perusal of Woodsmen of the West, one of the few fine local studies of a real type of Canadian life that have yet been written); partly because their work is in the woods which are windless and not dry.
Tokens of the lumbering life—besides the complexion—are jollity, a freedom from care amounting to something even more delightful than irresponsibility, an air of equality with something of superiority in it—indeed, with a good deal of superiority in it—and a childlike loquaciousness or an equally childlike dislike of talk. These last two qualities are both, I fancy, Canadian in general. One is generally told that the Canadians are ready talkers, will always address a stranger in the train, will be inquisitive and self-revealing to an extent unimagined by the Englishman. Mr. Kipling remarked, I remember, in his Canadian letters that you will learn from an Englishman in two years less than you will learn from a Canadian in two minutes. Mr. Kipling is perhaps the best boaster Canada ever drew to herself. My own experience in the matter of Canadian conversation is that a lot depends upon the individual. Introductions are certainly not waited for, and on a journey one may chat with strangers to one's heart's content. But it must be borne in mind that the traveller par excellence in Canada is the commercial traveller whose business it is to talk. Off the line—and on it, where other travellers are concerned—one finds men with a gift of silence that can at times be disheartening. It is natural that this should be so. Men in remote places lose the use of their tongues. All men are not talkers, indeed I think the great majority of men in any country are not talkers. When Canadians do talk, it must be admitted that they excel us, or their working-men do. Their working-men are not only ready, but also, superficially at any rate, remarkably well-informed about things outside their own particular job. They know what is being talked of, the prices of things, the value of land, astonishingly well. All Canadians know something about land; and about what he knows, the Canadian is not deprecating. Precisely for this reason, perhaps, the more educated men among them are at times considerably less interesting than ours. It is not that their conversational topics are few, but that they are circumscribed. The personal and dogmatic element enters into them, with the result that the subject discussed seems incapable of extension, and tends to become circular. I have met quite young men who were bores, and bores not only in essence, but in manner, like the clergymen of our comic papers. I do not know why it is, but I do know that it is sad. It may be that there are not enough women in Canada to prevent it. Men are so patient they will stand anything—even a bore. But where women abound, a man may not be tiresome either in his clothes or his conversation....
I believe the train at Sudbury was almost an hour late, which is why I have gone on so long noting trifles at large. When it did come in, somewhere about 8 A.M., we discovered that it was full up, and people had been standing in the first-class carriages all night. They had mostly breakfasted since, and the first-class carriage we got into was littered from end to end with bun-bags and sandwich-papers and orange peel, and all the refuse that results from picnics in trains. Tired parents and sleepy children were piled above this flotsam in an atmosphere hard to endure. Yet everybody was cheerful, and though we both wished in our hearts that we could have got 'sleepers' entitling us to Pullman accommodation, we were both grateful—or ought to have been grateful—that we were privileged to witness the contented spirit with which these representatives of the great Dominion bore their trials. Not a grumble—oh, my brother Englishman, not a grumble! Think of it.
CHAPTER XII
THROUGH THE HIGHLANDS OF ONTARIO
I sat in the tail of the train smoking, while Ontario dropped behind, league after league of thin trees growing out of the rock, of rock growing out of bog or lake, of bog or lake covering all solid things. Sometimes the trees were green and dark; sometimes green and light; sometimes nothing but scorched trunks—black skeletons of trees left by a forest fire which had killed everything within reach like a beast of prey, but consumed only the tender parts.
Somebody, as we swung over a typical piece of muskeg country—black and juicy bogland covered with a foot maybe of clear water—began to tell a story of a train that had run off the rails and plunged head first into just such a place. It had been a long train, he said; a goods train, and it had gone down and down. When he saw it, the last truck only stuck out of the muskeg. We listened respectfully. It was at least a well-found story, illustrating the difficulties the engineers had had in laying the lines across a treacherous ooze that nothing seemed to fill or make firm.
What will become of this one-thousand-mile stretch of swamped rock-land? Nobody knows. There it lies separating East from West, as land impassable, unnavigable as water. Firs and minerals, these are the only things to be expected from it. Firs tend to grow less, but the minerals of course may in the end so count that no one will wish the country other than the rock it is. All along the line the railway authorities have up the names of stations, as though there really were stations there, and, even more, as though there were villages or towns which those stations served. You are carried past a hundred such stations—names on a board and nothing more at all, unless it be a solitary wooden shack in which some railway subordinate passes his life seeing that the line is clear. The gangs of workers, Galicians or Italians, who do repairs along the line, camp out; you see their camps now and then, temporary settlements in this No Man's Land.
'Pays mélancolique et marécageux!' So Pierre Loti named Les Landes, and the description fits this country too, though I doubt if melancholy is a word to be found in a Canadian's vocabulary. 'Pretty poor stuff' a Canadian might allow it to be, but would immediately begin to talk of the fish in its waters, the big game to be got among the woods, and the mining possibilities it would reveal as soon as prospectors and syndicates got together. There never was a people less born to be depressed than the Canadians; nor do I think they will ever produce a Pierre Loti.
For my part, I began to find this country most fascinating when I started to think of its effect upon the history of Canada. It is easy to see that its very impenetrability hindered for a long time the growth of the West. Where there was no road there was no way for progress, and the great wheatlands were shut up beyond it, while Eastern Canada developed. What is less easy to see is the effect such a waste must have when the country on the other side has been populated and fertilised. A little time ago people began to think that East and West would simply reverse their order of importance. They said, 'Quebec and Ontario have depreciated in value. The rich land of Ontario has been ruined, why should any one stay there when in the West there is limitless wheatland to settle on?' But the trackless country still lay between—distance is not annihilated by a single railroad, nor by a dozen railroads. Quebeckers did not move West much. Ontarian farmers began to find that exhausted land could be renovated by scientific methods. If the plains had adjoined their farms, they would not have bothered to try those methods, but the muskeg and rock lay between. Some of them went West, but not all; they did not like it that the West was being settled from the States and Europe. In any case the West would have been an unfamiliar country—the American and English immigrants only made it more so—and the boasts of the West roused Eastern pride. Was the West best? Ontarians looked about them and found that not only could their present farms be improved but that there lay still in their own particular country virgin land that needed only to be cleared and worked. Already there is the new Ontario, north of the old Ontario, offering fresh fields and pastures new for the Canadian born who didn't mind clearing land as well as working it. It is land upon which the average immigrant is lost, upon which the average Ontarian is at home. Thus begins a northern movement which may spread any distance.
I have not said, and would not say, that the rock and water of Ontario account for this northern movement, for the fact that people are beginning to say, 'This East and West business is overdone. Canada is not a thin, straight line from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but a country stretching north to Hudson Bay, having the depth of the States almost, if a race spreads hardy enough to inhabit it.' The immediate cause of the northern movement was the discovery that wheat was as hardy as men, if not hardier, and would grow more north than an old-time settler ever dreamed of. The movement began in the North-West. All I would say is that if the waste country had not lain between the Ontarian farmer and the West he would have rushed with the rest, and the balance of importance would have shifted altogether westward. As it is, Ontarian farmers thrive again; new Ontario thrives excellently in a score of ways; the Canadian-born prosper in that part of Canada where they are—and always have been—most massed and most solidly Canadian. The West is a medley of races; and if it had suddenly become dominant by reason of its vastly superior prosperity, a people that could definitely be called Canadian would have been still further to seek than it is. Canada, in effect, would have had to restart becoming a nation.
All that day the rock and bog and timber kept dropping behind the train, and it was sunset before we came to the shore of Lake Superior. A thunderous glow hung over the lake, glimmering on the great granite cliffs. It was dark before we came to Port Arthur—proud possessor of the largest elevator in the world, and fierce rival of Fort William. In the morning we were in Manitoba.
CHAPTER XIII
THE OLD TIMERS OF KILDONAN AND THE NEW
TIMERS OF WINNIPEG
Winnipeg introduces the West. 'If you like Winnipeg,' I had been told before I got there, 'you will like the West.' I had been somewhat disheartened by this information. I had pictured Winnipeg as a smoke-laden city of mean and narrow streets, set off with board walks and wooden shacks of various sizes. I knew that I should not like Winnipeg if it were like that. Well, it is not like that. Main Street, which follows exactly the lines of the old Hudson Bay Company's trail, is a hundred and thirty-two feet wide, and the other streets are in proportion. Above is the immensely clear and lofty Canadian sky. The wooden shacks are not there, and you will have to go far to find the board walks. True, the buildings are, on the whole, less impressive than the streets, but there are some magnificent blocks rising several stories; and if you take an observation-car to go and see the sights of Winnipeg, you will find yourself brought to spots where further fine blocks are rising; and with the eye of the imagination you will behold Winnipeg as splendidly lofty as New York. I am not sure that for a place as warm as Winnipeg in summer and as cold in winter (I have heard the very truest Canadians say that they have been nearly frozen there in winter) the laying out of the town in so spacious a style is ideal. Streets narrower and more easily screened from the sun and wind would have seemed more comfortable to begin with. But then Winnipeg is growing, growing, growing; and it may be that some day even Main Street will seem shut in when it has its skyscrapers.
Certainly it is a mistake to have preconceptions of Canada. I found Winnipeg spacious instead of mean. I next found that instead of consisting of elevators and all the apparatus connected with the storage of wheat, it was all banks and cinematograph parlours. There were, it is true, shops and such things sandwiched in between. I recall a jeweller's shop containing the suitable and attractive placard in its window—'Marriage Licences for Sale Here.' It is true, too, that banks and cinematograph shows are not unconnected with wheat. In the banks you store the dollars you have made out of wheat; at the cinematograph shows you circulate them. But really there was an almost incredible number of these institutions.
Of the two kinds of business I felt that personally I would rather own a moving picture show. Winnipegers are, I feel sure, easy to amuse. And they look exceedingly prosperous. The air of prosperity struck me as more obvious in Winnipeg than in any other part of Canada. This may have been due in part to the ladies' hats. I saw some wonderful hats in Winnipeg. Of course there are some women who seem born to wear wonderful hats. Whatever they put on seems wonderful. But in Winnipeg this art of wearing wonders seemed almost universal. Ladies who might otherwise have passed for school teachers—so serene and even precise was their general bearing—were to be seen in hats that would be astounding either on Hampstead Heath or in Covent Garden opera. I was told the hats come direct either from London or Paris, and form an important part of the Steamship Companies' freights, since they are charged for not by weight but by their superficial area. I thought to myself, after I had seen a few samples of them, what sleepless nights the creators of these marvels must pass in the fear that they can never again rival, much less surpass, the last consignment to the Wheat City.
The men too have a prosperous appearance—always new hats, new coats, new cigars; and I was so much impressed by it that I began to study their faces to see if some new type—with the Croesus gift—had been developed in this western place. If they had all looked alike, or had not all looked prosperous, it would have been simpler. But they all looked different—more different than Londoners—as they would—for here all the nations of the earth are gathered, and over a score of languages are taught in the schools (just think of it!); and among these different faces one saw the old familiar aspects—the shrewd and the foolish, the strong-mouthed and the weak, the bluffer's and that of the man who counts. Clearly, they were not all amazing organisers, or men with the grit and the brains that must take them to the top. Not any more were so, I mean, than you would see in any big place. No, it was the economic conditions, not the men, which were changed.
Yet there is one thing noticeable in most of the faces one sees here. It is a general air of buoyancy—of greater expectation and, therewith, of greater self-satisfaction—in a good sense—than one sees at home. Just as the London clerk's face might be made to read!—'I am merely a city clerk on £50 a year—I shall never rise much higher, and I hope I may keep my place,' so the Winnipeg clerk's face might be taken to announce—'At present I'm helping along the Dominion Elevator Company. Luckily for them they're a go-ahead lot. I guess, though, they'll have to raise my salary soon, pretty good though it is now. If they don't, they'll have to look for another man. There are plenty of jobs waiting for me.'
If it is the truth, what could be better?
That there are more jobs than men in the West seems undeniable, though most of them of course are on the land. I had the pleasure of a talk with Mr. Bruce Walker, through whose hands all the immigrants to the West pass. Mr. Bruce Walker's office is in the station, which is one of the sights of the West, when an immigrant train arrives. For Winnipeg is their distributing centre, and in the station, when the train comes in, you may see more types of men and women than a year's travel in Europe would give you, and you may hear more different languages being spoken than went to the unmaking of the tower of Babel. To place all these people, men, women and children, in positions suited to their capacities, before the small sums of money with which they have arrived in the New World have given out, would seem to be a task which Napoleon might have shrunk from. But Mr. Bruce Walker appeared quite undismayed. Although in the first six months of 1910 the immigration from Great Britain alone had increased 98 per cent. over any other corresponding period, he had found no difficulty in dealing with it. He admitted that it meant increase of work for himself and his staff, but that was nothing, he said, so long as there were more jobs than men. 'And there are more jobs,' he said. 'It's amazing. But the extent to which Canada can absorb men seems endless.' He told me many excellent and amusing stories of the difficulties that arise in connection with the new-comers, but I have no space for them here.
The chief criticism to be directed against the Canadian Government's methods in dealing with immigrants is, I think, that it encourages on to the land men who are in some cases wasted there. It is natural that it should place immigrants on the land as far as possible. The land is there, apparently endlessly absorbent. It offers, superficially, work that any strong and able-bodied man should be capable of doing. Again, that Canadian theory that a man should be ready to turn his hand to anything, encourages the Canadian Government to believe that it is justified in turning the hands of immigrants to the work that most obviously wants doing. On the other side, it has to be remembered that while a man may be capable of turning his hand to anything, he is probably much more capable of turning his hand to the work he has been trained to; and not only that, but he is wasted to a large extent if he is not doing it. I am thinking particularly of the skilled workmen who emigrate to Canada from England. Turn them on to land and they may do fairly well; but turn them on to the work they are used to, and they will do much better. I do not say that the Canadian Government is bound to find for such men the work for which they are fitted; but in so far as they undertake to find work for immigrants, they should as far as possible find the right work. That jealousy which causes the United States to put obstacles in the way of the skilled immigrant who comes into the country, should not be encouraged in Canada. It is absurd to suppose that Canada is already stocked with skilled workmen, and I repeat it is waste to use men, who are skilled, in work to which they are wholly unaccustomed. Moreover, though these skilled artisans may in many cases only spend a certain time on the land (after which they find the job which they want and are accustomed to), yet in many other cases they may be so sickened by their time on the land, doing unaccustomed work badly, that they either become wastrels, or leave Canada altogether, believing it to be no country for workers like themselves, and saying so with all the bitterness of men who were capable of succeeding but did actually fail. Another point to which the immigration department might give all the attention it can spare, is that of making it as simple as possible for decent immigrants to be joined at the earliest opportunity by their wives and families. The lack of women in Canada is a curse which there is no disguising. For one thing, to have a country full only of able-bodied men without wives or families is to give it an air of prosperity which is unreal. For another, it is to leave it without any of the ambitions which cause the majority of men to save the money they make, and lay the foundations of a civilised nation. The other objections are obvious. A wise Government policy might go far towards making the period of separation between an immigrant and his wife shorter.
Later on, to get a contrast with Winnipeg, I went out to see Kildonan with a friend. It is the village where the Old-timers—the crofters from the highlands, whom Lord Selkirk brought out in 1812 to colonise the land—finally settled down. They had hard years enough; trouble with the Indians, great trouble with the rival fur company. The fur-traders could see in the farmers only men who would reduce the wild and spoil their own industry. Only after years were their disputes settled. Kildonan is three miles out from Winnipeg by electric-car—along a dusty road fenced with wire from the fat black land. The crofters must have rejoiced to see that loam. Nowadays it has mostly been turned to market-gardening for the supplying of Winnipeg, and the farmers have shifted further West. We turned down a country lane, shaded with maple woods and golden birches, and came presently to the banks of the Red River. Over on the other side, standing among light trees, stood Kildonan Church, the oldest church in Western Canada. We crossed by the ferry, and walked up into the churchyard. It is not large, but it is full, and everywhere you read the familiar Scottish names—Macleod—Black—Ferguson and the rest. The death among infants in those days seems to have been great—naturally enough—for Kildonan then was far from civilisation and doctor's help; and so, many small, unconscious settlers spent only a few days or weeks in the new land. But there were others that lived long. One of the most interesting gravestones commemorated the death of a settler who had come out from Kildonan, Sutherlandshire, at the age of nine. This in the year 1815—the year of Waterloo. He had lived to be past ninety. For his epitaph some one had chosen those noble words from the Epistle to the Hebrews: 'He looked for a city which hath foundations—whose maker and builder is God.'
I think it cannot matter now that the old man died before the great Canadian boom came, before Winnipeg had become the biggest wheat-centre of the world, before he could realise, who looked for a city which hath foundations, that even in his life he had attained to 'God's own country.'
CHAPTER XIV
A PRAIRIE TOWN AND THE PRAIRIE POLICE
Any one who knows the plains of Canada is aware that they rise in three tiers, the rise having a westward trend, and that the scenery of them varies as greatly as does the vegetation. Any one who has only been through the Canadian plains in the train is under the impression that, save for a bit of rolling country here and there in the distance, they are as level as a billiard table; and that, except that parts are cultivated and other parts are not, they look the same almost from start to finish.
The moral is obvious. Do not suppose that from the train you can see even the surface of the world.
This seemingly endless flat land, then, holds hills and gullies, rivers and lakes—everything indeed but trees. But what am I saying? There are heaps of trees in reality. Only they have a habit of concealing themselves, and those who want to see them in haste should perhaps take a guide.
There is more monotony in the towns of the plains, I think, than in the plains themselves. Not but what these towns must have differences known to their inhabitants. A man who lived in Moosejaw might conceivably deny that he could feel equally at home in Regina. A citizen of Regina would not dream of admitting that he could find his way blindfold about Moosejaw. Nevertheless all these little towns are singularly alike in construction. It is reasonable that they should be. They are all centres of a country engaged in a single great industry—the raising of wheat. Other things are raised, but in such small quantities, comparatively, that they do not count. And the people engaged in this great industry of wheat-raising are on a particular equality as regards the work they do, the leisure they have, and the tastes that result from the combination of that work and leisure. Some are richer, some poorer, some are wise, some foolish, but mostly they are working together pretty hard. The towns represent the places where they come after their work to bargain and be amused. Moreover, as I suggested in a previous chapter, the model for all other towns of the plains has always been Winnipeg, and Winnipeg is the embodiment of the notion that a city may be a finer city than Chicago if it only tries hard enough.
Architecturally, Winnipeg looks as though it always has allowed, and always will allow, for its own expansion. Other great cities have grown up anyhow, usually on lines that suggest that their greatness was thrust upon them unexpectedly. Winnipeg too has grown big—beyond all expectation one would have thought—yet it suggests in its lines that it never felt, even in those far-off days when Main Street was the Hudson Bay trail, that it would be anything but tremendous. Very likely it is an accident that Winnipeg did possess this power of expanding and Winnipegers did not deliberately foresee and provide for its future vastness. Be this as it may, the towns of the plains are not going to leave anything to chance. They are so planned, that when the time comes they will be ready to outdo Winnipeg. They rather expect to outdo Winnipeg. They even warn you that they will. Here is an example. I got out at some little station on the plains—let us call it Thebes. I don't think there is a Thebes in existence, but if not, it will come along soon, for the classics as well as the Indian languages are being ransacked to provide names for Canada's thousands of new-born towns. I prefer the classical or Indian-named towns to those that bear hybrid titles like Higgsville. I saw at once that Thebes consisted of about twenty shacks and a store. It was all there, just outside the station, and beyond was level prairie again, with one or two farmhouses on the horizon—wooden boxes, like bathing-machines off their wheels to look at.
I should not have been impressed by the greatness of Thebes, present or future, had I not, just by the ticket office, come upon a great placard, calling attention to a plan of the district marked off in square blocks in red and black cross lines. Beneath were two fanciful spheres, side by side, such as statisticians use—a large one marked Winnipeg, a smaller one marked Thebes: also, the following notification:—
'In 1870 Winnipeg had 240 inhabitants.
In 1910 Winnipeg has 180,000 inhabitants.
In 1910 Thebes has 74 inhabitants.
How many will Thebes have in 1925?
Buy a Thebes town lot.'
It may be that the method is an American one, recalling that by which Martin Chuzzlewit was persuaded to buy a lot in Eden city. An old-fashioned Englishman, straight from the old country, might even now be scared by it, and decide on the strength of it not to become a citizen of Thebes. He need not be scared. He can dislike the advertisement if he chooses, but he should bear in mind that by just such advertisements men were attracted to prosperity in the States as much as to adversity—even in the Dickens period—that real cities as well as sham ones were built up by them, and that anyway most of the Canadian land thus advertised is of an easily ascertainable value. He should remember, too, that a man nowadays, certainly in the new world, is not presumed to take every advertisement he sees as Bible truth. A smart advertisement, such as the Thebes one, is to a Canadian or American simply a proof that whoever it is wishes to sell Thebes town lots is a go-ahead person who clearly wants to do business, who probably knows how business ought to be done, who is likely to come to the point of doing it more quickly and ably than a man who won't even take the trouble to attract attention. No doubt the purchase of town lots is bound to be a speculative business. These little prairie villages may or may not become Winnipegs. Of the particular chances a man must satisfy himself. That there are chances is a certainty; and the advertiser is only clothing that certainty in what he considers an attractive garb.
I am very far from delighting in the 'plush of speech,' as Meredith called the language of the advertisers. Apart altogether from the fact that Canadians have not as yet learnt the art of understatement, the plush of speech is far too common in Canada. I suppose it was to be expected. Hard by lie the United States whose advertisers have, in a very few years, done more to blazon all the horrors of which the English tongue is capable than their great writers have done to point out its beauties. Their example has spread. So that in Canada, too, a barber's is announced as 'A Tonsorial Saloon'; a hat shop is 'A Bon Ton Millinery Parlour.' There may be some magic attraction in the words. The desire for a hat in the heart of a woman is not a definitely economic want; perhaps to be able to get a hat from a millinery parlour may strengthen that want. Only I know that speaking for myself, I would not willingly have my hair shortened oftener than was necessary, even if a tonsorial palace should be open to me for the process.
To go back to the prairie towns, their future is ever before them, and their citizens talk of them in the same proud, fond spirit as that in which a mother will discuss the career of the creature-in-the-perambulator, which for the ordinary person is too embryo to be distinguished as either a boy or a girl. Already, of course, the prairie towns are of all sizes, though you must never judge them by the size they are. Take Regina. It is a capital city, but the usual definition of a line—only reversed—best describes it. It has breadth without length. Its streets, which are called avenues, are astonishingly wide, the more astonishingly, because as soon as you start to walk along them they come to an end in prairie. I thought a notice which caught my eye as I wandered through the town rather characteristic. The notice was pasted outside a half-built block. It ran:—
'These premises will be open by September 5.'
It was long past 5th September, and those premises were not going to be open for some weeks to come. The roof was not on yet, and in fact I think the fourth wall had to go up. Still, when they were opened, they would be fine and solid. You could see that. It is the same with many of these western towns themselves. Some day they, too, are going to be fine and solid, but they are not really open yet, though a good deal of business is being done, with the roof still, so to speak, off, and the fourth wall still to go up. On the outskirts of Regina, for example, there are some 1911 Exhibition buildings which look rather larger than Regina itself. That is enterprise.
I stayed a whole day in Regina because I wanted to see the barracks of the famous North-West Mounted Police. It was a very hot day, and I was not sure where the barracks were, so I went into a hotel, partly to find out, partly to have a drink. The hotel was cool and pleasant, and after a little while a well-dressed gentleman came over and began chatting. We talked of various things, and then he asked me if I would not like to have my suit pressed for Sunday, as he would do it for a dollar. I said I should like it very well, but I had not time for it as I had to go out to the police barracks.
'You don't think of joining them, do you?' he inquired with much disdain.
'Why?' I asked.
'You're a fool if you do,' he said; 'there's too much discipline about them. You spend your whole time saluting every one you see if you're in the police. I know what it is. I was two years in the American Navy.'
I did not inform the ex-naval clothes-presser that I'd rather belong to the police than press clothes, nor, indeed, did I waste any further time upon him, and I only mention him because he is one of the less valuable American types that find their way into Canada, and also because he was the only man I met who had a word to say against the mounted police.