LOOKING FROM LAKE AGNES DOWN ON LAKES MIRROR AND LOUISE.
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,' {vi} 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 {vii} 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 {viii} 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
XIX. A HOT BATH IN BANFF
XX. CANADA AND WOMAN
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
XXX. BACK THROUGH OTTAWA
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
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
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 {2} 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 {4} 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 {5} 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.
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. {7} 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 {8} 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 {9} 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, {10} 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 {11} 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 {13} 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 {14} 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.
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 {16} 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 {17} 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 {18} 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, {20} 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 {21} 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 {22} 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 {23} 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 {25} 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.
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 {27} 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 {28} 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 {29} 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 {30} 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 {31} 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 {32} 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. {33} 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 {34} 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 {35} 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 {36} 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.
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 {38} 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 {39} 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 {40} 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 {41} 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 {42} 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 {43} 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, {44} 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 {45} 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 {46} 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.
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, {48} 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 {49} 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 {51} 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, {52} 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 {53} 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. {54} 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 {55} 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.
'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, {57} 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 {58} 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 {59} 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 {60} 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 {61} 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 {62} 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 {63} 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 {64} 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 {65} 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.
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 {67} 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 {68} 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 {69} 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. {70} 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 {71} 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 {72} 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; {73} 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 {74} 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 {75} 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 {76} 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 {77} 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, {78} 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 {79} 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 {80} 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.
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 {82} 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 {83} 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, {84} 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 {85} 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 {86} 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 {87} 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 {88} 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. {89} 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 {90} 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 {91} 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.'
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 {93} 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 {94} 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 {95} 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 {96} 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 {97} 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 {98} 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 {99} 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 {100} 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 {101} 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.
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 {103} 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 {104} 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 {105} 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 {106} 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, {107} 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 {108} 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.
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 {110} 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 {111} 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?' {112} 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. {114} 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.
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 {116} 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 {117} 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, {118} 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 {119} 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 {120} 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 {121} 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 {122} 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 {123} 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 {124} 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.'
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 {126} 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 {127} 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, {128} 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 {129} 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 {130} 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 {132} 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 {133} 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.
The sun can be very hot on the prairie, and it was very hot that afternoon when I did at last set out for a two-miles' tramp to the barracks. Nobody was walking that way except myself, and nobody was even riding. There was a fine dust about, and I needed brushing as well as pressing before I reached my destination. When I did get there, the courteous welcome of the second-in-command caused me to forget that the way had been long, or that anything greatly mattered except to hear about the North-West Mounted Police from the officer who was good enough to show me all round, from the horse-hospital to the prison cells. The latter were the least inviting part of the barracks, and I decided on the spot that if I committed a crime I would {134} not select the North-West of Canada for the scene of it.
I doubt if Canada, or England, has anything to be prouder of than the North-West Mounted Police. Some of their deeds have been told from time to time—that of the mounted policeman, for example, who brought a homicidally-disposed maniac down hundreds of miles from the frozen country, saved his charge from frost-bite, and lost his own reason in the process; that of the corporal who went into the camp where Sitting Bull sat armed with all his braves about him, and gave him a quarter of an hour to clear over the border. But under a hundred less-known acts the same spirit has run—the spirit of the one representative of justice triumphant over incredible odds.
'It's made possible,' said my guide, 'partly because we have men who regard every capture they're told off to make as a matter of personal honour, partly because people know that if a man commits a crime, we get him in the end. We go on till we do. Sitting Bull knew that if he killed our corporal we'd hang him and every man with him. So he went.'
All kinds of men are represented in the mounted police, but this officer told me that the recruit they liked best to get was 'the {135} young man with blood in him,' from an English public school or university, as much as from anywhere; fond of riding and shooting, and not lost when he is acting alone hundreds of miles from headquarters. The district patrolled, remember, by five hundred men is not much smaller than Europe minus Russia. Wanting that kind of man, the authorities see to it that, in barracks at all events, he is comfortable, and very little in the way of the accommodation for these police could be improved upon.
The most historic part of the barracks is that window through which Louis Riel stepped out—to drop with the rope round his neck. I was shown it hurriedly. It is the capture of their man, not his execution, that is these policemen's pride. Their record shows that almost always they take him alive, with no struggle—a strange thing, and one more proof of the reputation the police have built up for themselves. 'What is the use of struggling with these men?' seems to be the natural thought in the mind of the pursued; and no doubt much bloodshed is saved as a result of it. I learnt a lot of stray Canadian facts that afternoon. I learnt that the immigrants known under the somewhat vague heading of 'Galicians' are at present considered the leading {136} toughs, owing to their habit of using their knives at random. Galicians mean roughly all those who come from central Europe, and would, of course, include Letts. So that it is not, apparently, merely the climate of England that induces in these particular aliens a homicidal mania. It would be interesting to know the opinion of a North-West Mounted Policeman on 'the Battle of London.' Another thing I learnt was that a hundred miles a day is no unusual distance for one of these policemen to cover on horseback, and that of all the districts patrolled by them that in the neighbourhood of the North Pole is most sought after. They do not believe in English stirrups and girths any more than they believe in the British truncheon. They do believe in sobriety. The man with the drinking habit cannot continue, so I was told, a mounted policeman.
As I walked back into Regina, I remember seeing in one of the principal streets a second notice which struck me as quaint. The notice was:—
'Please do not spit on the side-walks.'
The quaintness of it consisted in the last three words. 'Please do not spit' one could understand. I should like to see that notice up almost anywhere in Canada, since the habit it {137} deprecates is almost universal. It is worst, perhaps, in a smoking compartment, where it is difficult to get one's legs away from the neighbourhood of spittoons. I have sat for hours feeling all the emotions of the son of William Tell while the apple was still balanced on his head, and his father was in the act to shoot. But it is an uncivilised, unhealthy, absolutely unnecessary habit anywhere. That is why, for a public authority to suggest that it may be done, provided it is not done on the side-walks, is quaint. It should either be ignored or penalised. When one reads, as one does so often in the papers, of the ravages made by tuberculosis in Canada, it almost looks as if offenders should be penalised. Certainly they should not be politely requested to spit a few inches more to the left or the right. And why provide them with spittoons?
Alberta is at present the débutante of the Dominion.
Countries, like cities, used to grow up and, if we stick to our metaphor, 'come out' anyhow. It is true there were people called statesmen who had at times bright ideas concerning the commonweal which they tried to put into practice, and sometimes succeeded in putting into practice, with not unsatisfactory results. But the commonweal they had in mind was a limited one. It was not truly 'common,' either in respect of the people whose weal was considered, or in respect of the weal it was desired to affect. Statesmen, in fact, thought usually only of a particular section or part of the population of their country and also thought only of a particular aspect of that section's welfare—usually either its soul or its prestige; very rarely its material prosperity.
Things have not altogether changed. Things {139} don't. Statesmen still consider particular classes rather than the nation as a whole, and their notions of what weal means are still limited notions. But there is this difference. That aspect of the commonweal which can be referred to somewhat vaguely as material prosperity now bulks very large in their minds, and, as a result of it, the idea is beginning to prevail that not only can cities be planned before they are built, but that whole provinces can and should be encouraged to grow in certain thought-out directions.
In the old world the new idea is likely to work slowly and somewhat obscurely. Cities and countries have already grown up there in the old-and-anyhow style; and grown-up things, like grown-up people, are not easily changed. In England, for example, we may think that large properties are a mistake; but they will not, with anything that can be called celerity, be turned into small holdings. So with our cities. There they are—fully grown and fully stocked with vested interests. The possessors of those interests cannot see in any proposed change the vast improvement that the non-possessors see in it. The most that can be expected in England in the immediate future is that, slowly and imperceptibly, certain {140} outrageous mistakes of the past will be remedied, and that where new developments are essential, they shall be the result of ideas, rather than of confusions. The Town-Planning Bill is, I imagine, a case in point. The most conservative people are beginning to see that in itself an idea is not a vicious thing and may even produce a good result.
In the new world (and perhaps in the German Empire too) the notion of planning the future of town or country instead of leaving it to luck is having much swifter and more demonstrable effects. On the Canadian plains, as I have pointed out, towns are being laid out largely with an eye to their future. The same thing is being done for the countryside. It, too, is being planned with an eye to its future. It is not growing up just anyhow; it is being made to grow in particular directions.
How much this is the idea of statesmen, of the public officials, that is to say, of the Dominion; and how much it is due to the managers of private companies and enterprises, historians will some day be able to decide. I incline to the view that at present the big railway companies represent far the most influential force in Canada, and that they, without any of the outward paraphernalia of office, {141} are deciding what Canada is to be for a good many years to come.
Naturally they work from what may be called the railway point of view. Their notion of a Canadian commonweal takes the form, therefore, of a country in which a settled and prosperous population lives along the lines of the railroads, and is so distributed that there shall be no uninhabited spaces through which the running of trains will cease to be a paying proposition. There are bound, of course, to be some intervals of the kind. The highlands of Ontario form such a gap in the system of the Canadian Pacific Railway. That gap is not easy to fill: Alberta is.
A few years ago Alberta was far from being a profitable country through which to run trains. Cattle-ranching maintained the thinnest of populations, and the leagues of sunburnt plains east of Calgary seemed to offer few chances to a more numerous class of settler. Any one who had prophesied then that they would shortly be crowded with wheat-farmers would have been laughed at. But they are being crowded, comparatively crowded, now. And the credit for this must be given those who started the Bow River irrigation works. No doubt there are other reasons for the rise of Alberta. The {142} discoverers of new wheats have helped it; so have the American farmers who, by spoiling the land across the line, created a demand for new land. But the irrigation works are the main factor, and when the Octopus, as the Canadian Pacific Railway is not uncommonly called, is had up for judgment, these and many other of their achievements will help them to make a stout defence. True, it is their own land they are irrigating; it is passengers and freight for themselves that they want to secure; but, whatever the motive, they are advertising and causing to be populated and cultivated hundreds of square miles on either side of their own particular land which might otherwise have lain waste for many years.
It may be said—Where is the plan in this? Where is it any different from the schemes of any railway country in the old world. The difference is that in the old world as a rule the railway company follows trade, and runs only through populous parts where that trade is to be got; whereas in Canada, railway companies lay their lines through the desert, so to speak, and then start to fill it in an orderly and profitable manner. Alberta at present is being planned into existence. It is not booming simply on its own merits, great though these {143} may be. It lay fallow for many years. For all one knows, other parts of Canada may have more of a future. But they are not being boomed as Alberta is, because the time has not yet come when they must, in the opinion of the railway companies, be filled in.
The need for the filling in of Alberta is one of the reasons why Calgary has sprung up so quickly. A few years ago Calgary had no future to speak of. Men not as yet middle-aged, can remember camping in Calgary in tents. There was only one place to dance in, and ranchers used to take turns at entering it. Now Calgary is a stone-built town of solid appearance, and still more solid importance. Like so many other Canadian towns, it is more important than it looks. It looks bustling enough, but hardly important. There are no buildings of a size to take the eye. The hotels are singularly inadequate. They are not only not comfortable enough for their guests, but they are not large enough. I had occasion to visit Calgary twice within a week, and each time I got the last bed in a different hotel, and tried to be thankful for it, but did not succeed. I suppose that prosperity has overtaken it at such a pace that it has not had time as yet to consider its responsibilities. {144} A town which permits one of its best hotels to place three double beds in one bedroom—and perhaps as many as nine guests in the three double beds—may already be great, but it has not realised its greatness.
Calgary differs from the prairie towns which lie between it and Winnipeg, in that it is not really a prairie town, but a town on the edge of the prairie. It looks at the mountains; and it is built of the grey stone that is found near by; the Chinook winds that sweep it and make its climate comparatively mild, are mountain winds; and it stands on the Bow River, which is a mountain river, swift and clear, and blue with the blue that is melted from snowfields. This is none of your turbid streams like the Assiniboine or the Red River. All rivers must run to the plains at last, but the Bow River does not seem to belong to them, though it feeds them more than most. In the old days Calgary, such as it was, owed everything to the hills. The cattle-ranchers settled round there because the Chinook winds, scatterers of the snow, made outdoor grazing possible for their cattle during months when Manitoba and Saskatchewan were deep in frozen drifts. And since it was just at the foot of the mountains, the miners in the mountains {145} used it as a supply centre. It is still a centre for ranchers and miners; but its real importance is that it has become the headquarters of that prairie which produced once, perhaps, half a ton of hay to the acre, and now yields the finest wheat in the world. If any statues are to be put up in the town—and it would be as well to wait for a native sculptor of talent—they should be the statues of the men who constructed the irrigation works.
Later on, but this is a smaller matter perhaps, I should like to see a statue put up to the man who will make it possible for the bars of Calgary to be allowed to remain open between the hours of 7 P.M. on Saturday, and 7 A.M. on Monday. At present they are shut during those hours, which means, I take it, that Calgarians, if admitted, would drink more than was good for them. The person therefore, to whom the suggested statue should be raised, would be the man who made the Calgarian attitude towards the drink question more civilised. I know that the problem is not peculiar to Calgary or to Canada. It may even be that Canada for a new country does more to solve it than most. I recollect than when I got back to England, one of the first things that caught my eye was an {146} interview given to a local paper by a leading Hertfordshire man, who had also just returned from travelling through Canada. He assured the interviewer that, having been from end to end of Canada, he had never once seen a man the worse for liquor. It must have been a delightful, but perhaps unique experience. I had not his good fortune, and having talked with many decent Canadians, seldom fanatics, and rarely indeed total abstainers, who nevertheless deplored the prevalence of the drink evil in the West, I cannot think that that Hertfordshire traveller's happy blindness is a thing to be imitated. Drink takes another form—perhaps a less vicious one—in a new country; but it ruins more good men than it does in an old one.
There is vague talk at times about the Americanisation of Canada. Very dismal people talk about its Americanisation by force of arms. Minor pessimists think the change will come about peaceably. How can the Canadians—they ask—continue to assert themselves for ever against the constant influx from the other side?
Monsieur André Siegfried, in that most lucid and excellent book, Les Deux Races en Canada, considers this question a little, but the very fact that he has called the book Les Deux Races en Canada, shows that he considers the question premature. The two races he treats of are not the Canadians and the Americans, but the French Canadians and the Canadians who are not French. Certainly these two peoples are at present, and must for a considerable time to come, be considered the two main races of the Dominion. They {148} are still for all practical purposes separate without being hostile; and it is quite possible that one of these may Canadianise the other before any real Americanisation makes itself felt. Should the French Canadians get the upper hand, it is pretty certain that American influence would get a set-back of perhaps centuries. Yet English writers as a rule never seem to consider this contingency. Perhaps if they did, they would begin to think that they would rather see Canada Americanised than Gallicised.
Still the Americanisation may happen, and it is at least an interesting possibility. Let us consider the task that lies before the Americans. They will have to absorb—
(1) The French Canadians.
(2) The Canadian born, who are not French.
(3) The English who have immigrated.
(4) Foreign immigrants; e.g. Scandinavians, Galicians, Italians, Doukhobors—all that strange assortment of people who have flowed in from the poorer countries of Europe.
The Americans themselves represent at present only a small fifth in this conglomeration of nations. Still, they have this in their favour, that they start in while Canada is still an unfixed nation. French Canadians—a small {149} third—only number about three millions. Non-French Canadians about the same. The whole population is under ten millions. It may in fifty years be ten times that number. So that anything may happen.
Meanwhile, many effective American influences are at work. Their order of effectiveness is not easy to define, but when one considers their representatives of business enterprise, capital, journalism and farming at work in the country, one can see that the Americans are likely to go far.
What is their present value to the Dominion? Take American farmers. They are an undoubted gain to Canada in so far as they possess energy, capital, a knowledge of the local conditions, versatility and adaptability. I hardly know if it is an example of their versatility or their adaptability, but as soon as they cross over the line, American farmers who were Tariff Reformers instantly become Free Traders. It is not, of course, that they have adopted nobler principles in their new country. It is merely that, having become Canadians, they have now to support Canadian manufactures, and pay more for their farming machines and shoddy clothes. Naturally they think tariffs a mistake.
Setting aside for a moment this political elasticity as of doubtful value, Canadians may still wonder if the American farmer is all gain to them. Is it an objection, for example, that the American introduces the purely commercial spirit into farming? Not entirely. Not certainly so far as love of gain induces promptness and enterprise. It is, however, an objection if it destroys that love of the land which causes the English farmer to stick by his farm, generation after generation. Perhaps American farmers have not that land love in any case. If they had, they would not have crossed the line. In most cases, they have crossed it to make money—more money. It may be argued that the English farmers come further for the same purpose, but that is not really the case. English farmers who come are mostly men who were tenants, and find themselves either not making money or expecting to have their rents raised if they do. Or they are the sons of farmers who have not the capital to start farming in the old country, or cannot get the land. The American farmer is usually quite ready to admit that he is in Canada to make money, and his enemies will admit for him that though this ideal may lead him to adopt new methods {151} of farming which are good, it also induces him to adopt that very old method of farming which consists of getting all you can out of the land, putting nothing into it, selling it to a fool and moving on to fresh land—which is a bad method. Any one who is acquainted with the States at all, knows how at present people there are awakening to the viciousness of this practice. All their papers and speakers are full of the wastefulness which Americans practised in the last century thinking it to be smartness. Fine land, they say, was spoilt by it; forests were annihilated; water supplies were overdrawn; people were made restless. It was getting rich quick at the expense of posterity, and it bred in Americans a nomadic spirit, and an imprudence in considering the future, which has become a menace.
Canadians cannot altogether condemn the American farmer, for just these methods spoilt so much of the land in Ontario; and only now are their farmers beginning to improve on them. Still, they would do well to indicate to American farmers that they are welcome only as improvers and not as wasters of the new country. The trouble is to give an effective indication of that kind. Settlement of the land is still reckoned, especially by the {152} railway companies, as the first of virtues, covering a multitude of sins; though even they, I think, are recognising a little that the English farmer, whose aim is not an immediate fortune, but a home which he can retain for his life and hand over to his children after him, is not to be scorned as he was a few years ago. The ready-made farms, made possible by the irrigation work of the Canadian Pacific Railway, are the chief example of the attempts made to draw the Englishman. 'We hope,' said one of the Canadian Pacific Railway officials, speaking a few months ago before the London Chamber of Commerce, 'that the Englishmen on these farms will leaven the lot.' A few years ago, compliments of that sort were not being offered to the English farmer in Canada. Probably he was not so good a type as comes in now. But it is to be remembered that the English immigrant has always had more adaptations to make than the American. To the American from the northern States, Canada is the country he is used to—only a little more north. The Englishman finds a new soil, new climate, new manners, and new methods. I should say that man for man, the English farmer knows at least as much as the American about farming, and {153} a great deal more than the average Canadian. But when he goes out to Canada he has to put this knowledge behind him and learn afresh—a difficult thing for a conservative race. The American can hold on to what he knows and simply go ahead. The accident of birth has given him a fine start over the Englishman.
The same advantage belongs to other Americans in Canada. Business men, capitalists, journalists have only had to cross a non-existent line, instead of an undeniable ocean. When Canadians complain that Englishmen take no interest even in those Canadian schemes for which they have found the money, they forget that capitalists cannot always be close to their investments. I repeat, the Atlantic is not a thing to be denied, nor is it fair to call the English mere moneylenders because they have not always personally accompanied their loans. At least they have shown themselves trustful of the men on the spot.
Nevertheless, I think that Canada has every reason to be grateful for the able business men whom the States have sent her. That negro porter at the Niagara Hotel who said that Canadians were a stupid people, and would have done nothing without the {154} Americans, was taking rather a spread-eagle view of the facts. Still there is no doubt that American brains have been—and still are—of great service to Canada; nor can I see that they can be charged with Americanising tendencies. Business men are nearly always cosmopolitan in their achievements, whatever their motives may be.
It is rather different with American journalists. They can hardly as yet be charged with being citizens of the world, and where their influence penetrates, an American trend is noticeable. They are beginning to leave their mark in Canada. Canadian papers are numerous and creditable, but an American atmosphere broods over them. The most trivial incident is magnified by headlines, which repeat three times over in large type and increasingly pompous language all and more than all that follows in the news space. I am not talking of the best Canadian newspapers but of the average ones. If their methods are American, so very largely are the matters they deal with. In some small up-country Canadian journal one will find the leading columns occupied with the account of some dinner given, say, by Mrs. Van So-and-So of New York, wife of the Coffin King, {155} with full accounts of the costumes, menu, etc.,—wearisome and vulgar matter, staringly of no interest whatever to the bucolic readers of the journal in question. But it was all very cheaply wired from the States: whereas news from England would be costly in the extreme. The result is that Canadians—in spite of their local sagacity—are at least as ignorant of the things that happen in Great Britain and Europe as we are of what is happening in Canada. Often I have felt while the Canadian-born were talking to me of the 'Old Country,' talking of it too, not only in a loyal, but a fond and even wistful manner—that they had in their minds a picture of it that would probably have fitted England better in the fourteenth century than it does now. A poor, worn-out, tottering old country is what they are thinking of; and nothing would amaze some of them more than to see modern England as it is.
Why should they have got this idea into their heads? Largely, I suppose, because the new with them is necessarily best. The old things were put up anyhow by men in a hurry and they are always superseded by better things. The very epithet 'old' connotes badness to a Canadian. Then, again, it is a {156} country of young men, and young men are apt to favour youth, which they hardly associate with England. No country—not even Spain—can be as antique and ramshackle as many of them undoubtedly believe England to be. Birmingham and Manchester are on paper such very ancient cities compared with Regina and Moosejaw that the untravelled Canadian thinks pityingly of the former; whereas he considers the latter infinitely up-to-date and important, and would be hurt to know that we have in England hundreds of little prosperous country towns very like them, of which the ordinary Englishman hardly knows the names and, if he did, would think no more of than he would think of Regina and Moosejaw.
I would not seek to minimise that Canadian pride and optimism which finds such satisfaction in everything that they build. Pride and optimism are valuable assets to any country. All I would suggest is that they should realise that the English habit of grumbling and self-depreciation does not indicate that all Englishmen live in a tottering old realm, doing nothing but decay and grumble.
Here we come back to newspapers. Most people derive their facts from newspapers nowadays, and if Canadians find that everything {157} of importance happens in the new world, whereas in the old world nothing happens except an occasional sensational murder or the deposition of a third-class king, they cannot infer that Europe is still an important continent, and that perhaps the most important country in it is England. What is to enlighten them? I suppose the receipt of more news from Europe.
Probably the All Red Cable would do much in this direction. News has to be cheap or it is not news (the converse proposition that news if it is cheap must be news, is not true). Much also might be done by private enterprise. English publishers could do more to push their wares. So could English magazine proprietors. Most of the books and magazines one can get in a hurry in Canada are American. English Cabinet Ministers might now and again make a tour in the Dominion and explain to Canadians some of those political principles in which at home they have such fervid belief. It may be that the Americanising tendency is too strong for any of these suggestions to be of much avail in combating it. Reciprocity treaties between the States and Canada may inevitably result in closer union, though I never could feel that it was a marked human characteristic to pine for fellow-citizenship with the man whom {158} one supplies with bread in return for a reaping-machine. Trade relations may result in that mystic fraternal sentiment by which nations come together, though hitherto in the world's history men have never shown any very frantic desire for a heart-to-heart intimacy with their tradespeople. 'Utility, Reciprocity, Fraternity' sounds rather a cold cry by which to rally two great people together.[1]
[1] This chapter was written before the Reciprocity business flamed forth. I return to the subject later.
When all is said and done, and there are a hundred other pros and cons which might be considered, the chief obstacle to the Americanisation of Canada is climate. Canada is north and America is south; and those two show less inclination to rush together than even east and west. Of course it is not extremes of north and south that are represented in the two countries;—along the boundary the climates are not dissimilar. Yet it seems to me that while Canada is bound to be mainly a country of northern peoples, Americans are fast becoming more and more southernised, I do not mean in the old sense of becoming languid and effeminate and semi-tropical, but southernised in just the same way as the French from being Norsemen have become southernised. Have {159} you seen prints of old Paris when it was a Gothic city? If you have, you will realise the completeness of the change that has come over it. It spreads itself to the sun now, faces to the Midi, and some such change might easily come over New York, Chicago, and the rest of those at present northern cities. Already the typical American is far from being the son of a grim and dour Pilgrim Father. Rather he is lively and energetic—with a temperament always on tiptoe—logical and apt to be materialistic, yet sentimental and passionate too. You find such a temperament among the French and Italians of northern Italy. It is the sun working on them. Even the stolid German and the moody Scandinavian feels it when he gets to the States, and thaws—into an American.
It is not so in Canada. The northern immigrants there remain silent and frosty, though the touch of fortune makes them perhaps more genial. Canada will never become a southern country, even though its northern parts are rendered temperate by the cutting down of timber and constant ploughing. No, I think Canadians will remain a hardy and somewhat dour race, slow-moving on the whole, but industrious and virtuous, suspicious of talkers and hustlers; so suspicious, too, of free {160} thought and new morals as to lay themselves open maybe to the charge of hypocrisy; given at times to self-distrust and self-depreciation, but for the most part steadfast, and holding in their hearts the belief that there is no place like Canada and no men like the inhabitants thereof.
In short, they are as likely as not to end by becoming Anglicised.
There was a time when Englishmen got a very bad name in Canada. It was not to be wondered at. For a long time English youths, who came to be known as Remittance Men, used to be shipped out by relations anxious only to get rid of them. These helped to create an opinion that Englishmen were more remarkable for their drinking than their working powers; and when to them was added shipload after shipload of unemployables from yet lower classes, Canadians began to get impatient of English immigrants. It was not logical of them to suppose that these were favourable specimens of our working-classes; it is never logical to suppose that the best men of a country are ready to leave it. Logic, however, is difficult to insist on under these circumstances, and though there were plenty of Englishmen even then, and even more Scots perhaps, who were obviously as good as any farmers on the {162} prairie, the bad name of the English clung to them. That is all, or nearly all, changed now; and the project connected with those farms, which came to be known in the English papers as the Ready-made farms, proved that the Canadian Pacific Railway Company at any rate, which is the biggest landowner in Canada, was ready to welcome English farmers to the land, if they could get the right sort. Readers will perhaps remember that the idea of the company was to provide farms ploughed, irrigated, sowed, and furnished with house and out-buildings, into which English colonists, having been handed the front-door key, could enter—straight from England—as well equipped almost as settlers who had lived there for years. The purchase money was to be spread over a certain term, after which the land would become the property of the farmers.
The plan saves all that intermediate period during which the ordinary homesteader has to set up his shack, sink his well, and generally unsettle himself over the tedious work of settling in. Good farmers are not necessarily born pioneers; and since the prairie in winter, when work is slack, does not show a very hospitable climate to new-comers and those unaccustomed to it, it generally happens that {163} the English immigrant has to waste the spring and perhaps the whole working season in the unremunerative business of settling in. The Ready-made farms were intended to save all this time and trouble, and they were at once filled—in the spring of 1910—by specially picked men from the old country. The men were not all necessarily farmers, but they were, hypothetically, at any rate, men of intelligence and grit.
I wanted to see how they were getting on after six months of this new life on the prairie. For that purpose I took train from Calgary with a friend, back along the line to Strathmore, which is forty miles east, and is the station for Nightingale, as this first colony of ready-made farmers has been named. Strathmore itself is not peculiarly beautiful or peculiarly interesting, though it has a demonstration farm which is. We went over the demonstration farm with Professor Eliott, its manager, who struck me as one of the keenest and most interesting men of the West. What he does not know of the productivity of the prairie is probably not worth knowing; and his experience seems to be at the service of any farmer who has the intelligence to apply for it. He showed us his barns and splendid teams of horses and leviathan oats, and the little trees which he has planted {164} in this country where it was thought no trees would grow, and which he believes will change the face of it in a few years. We were full of the future of the prairie when we got back to Strathmore, and put up for the night in the last bedroom of the one and only hotel. The two of us were lucky to get that last bedroom containing a double bed to ourselves, for more often even than in Calgary six people sleep in such a room and are very glad of the accommodation. So I was told. It shows how things move in Alberta; what a hustle there is upon the country.
We tossed for the bed, and I got it, and the other man took two blankets and the floor. I slept very well, especially after a mounted policeman came in and threw out two gentlemen next door who were, as the hotel boy tersely put it, 'seeing snakes together.' My friend slept less well. The room was small, not much bigger than the bed, and we could not get the window to stay open. It had not been constructed with a view to admitting fresh air. Still, after breakfast in a dark chamber, where about thirty guests of every profession and clothing (but all land-seekers) ate in silence, we started pretty fit for Nightingale in a two-horse rig.
I wish I could describe the prairie. Harvesting was over, so that in any case the leagues of golden wheat which you read about in advertisements were not visible. It was another kind of monotony altogether that we drove through—a kind I cannot begin to suggest the charm of. It was a kind of bare, rolling, sunburnt country, with a high sea-wind blowing through it, and waves of dust and an endless sky. Intensely wearisome or intensely refreshing it must be, according to a man's temperament; and going there from trees and hills must be like changing from a room with patterned paper to one with whitewashed walls. And then the soil, light and fertile, stoneless, ready for the plough—the farmer wants no variety of that.
We drove fourteen miles, as far as I can remember, to get to Nightingale, and it was all bad driving. Alberta seems to want roads badly. In the old ranching days roads mattered less. The prairie was a ready-made riding country, and nothing was produced or needed that could not, so to speak, go of itself across country. 'I never owned a plough the seventeen years I was there,' a retired rancher told me proudly. 'It was a fine country then.' But it is a fine country now, too, and going to be finer still when it has roads. At present even {166} the roadways are changing. Once you could go everywhere. Now from day to day a new farmer takes up a new piece of land, and what was the road is enclosed by a wire fence.
One of the most inspiriting farms we passed was that of a man who had been out from Cheshire only three months. He was now a chicken rancher—kept fowls, as we say; and in his brief occupation had got up—off a quarter block—eighty tons of hay, besides winning thirty-eight prizes at Albertan poultry shows. This would seem to show that Alberta is not yet rich in pure bred fowls. The Cheshire chicken rancher said he hoped to show the people round what a good table bird ought to look like. He was already a Canadian in all but accent. May he prosper!
After talking with him we drove on again towards Nightingale in the same sea-wind along the same bad roads. The sameness of the country was amazing; nor should I have known in the end that we had come to Nightingale but for the man driving us. 'See that avenue?' he said. 'The shacks standing along that are the farms. It seems more sociable being along a road.' 'Certainly,' I said. So it is more sociable to live along a road, provided you know it is a road. I {167} didn't, but the colonists did, and that was the main thing. We found those we visited apparently contented and undoubtedly hopeful. Canada has the gift of making men hopeful. Though it had been in this part a very poor year, owing to drought, and though the irrigation had not been properly ready (but accidents will happen, and the company was charging only a nominal rent as a result of this) the farmers seemed as cheery as they would have been dismal in England. The crops had been poor, but they would do for chicken-feed. A bumper year was a sure thing some time or other. The future held no clouds. They were going to study Canadian methods suited to the country. I rubbed my eyes. These sentiments were being enunciated by an English farmer, who was meanwhile giving us a most hospitable English lunch. He was going to tell more people to come out. It was the finest farming land possible, once you get the water on it. Only one must take local advice how to run things. It was no good standing out, and knowing better than people on the spot, as one of the colonists was doing. He, I gathered, was the only man regarded as likely to do badly, being determined to stick to the methods of his English forebears. His leading {168} wrongheadedness was in declining to believe that the winter was going to be or could be as long and as hard as people said, and he had not got in half the food needful for his cattle.
I suppose, but for that winter, the prairie would be the most sought-after country in the world. But for that winter, however, it would not possess the amazing friable soil it does. As has been remarked, one cannot have everything all the time. The winter is very severe, and there should be no disguising of the fact, nor indeed any exaggerating of it. Formerly its hardships were no doubt exaggerated. People had no use for a hard winter. Nowadays leisured people go in search of it—on the understanding, however, that it shall be made easy for them. They would like it less if they had to work in it in a below zero temperature, twenty or thirty miles from anywhere. I do not say that work under such conditions should or would disgust healthy and energetic men, provided they were prepared for it. It might even delight them. But it should be prepared for. English farmers in particular should be made to understand the drawbacks as well as the advantages of the new land they are going to. Honesty is in fact the best {169} emigration policy. Given that, it is tolerably certain that these transplanted English farmers are going to find it more than worth while to have settled in Nightingale or any of the newer prairie colonies, and what is more—Canada is going to find it more than worth while to have them settled there.
For several days I had seen the Rockies far off—a black and jagged coil of mountains, that seemed at times almost to be moving like some prehistoric great scaly beast on its endless crawl across the plains. Now I was to see them near by—some part of them at least. What has any man seen in that ocean of mountains but a few drops?
At the unpleasing hour of 3.30 A.M. I disengaged myself from one of the three double beds with which my room in the hotel was furnished, washed slightly, dressed completely, and walked to the station. Calgary was quiet at last. There had been a sound of revelry by night. A man with a tenor voice had been singing songs in some adjacent room to the hotel up to 3.30. But his songs and the vamped accompaniment to them had ceased now, and peace prevailed. I don't {171} remember to have passed any one on the way to the station. There were two or three sleepy-eyed people lounging about there; there always seem to be a few in Canadian stations, no matter what the hour. I think they must be out-of-works who keep their spirits up by listening to the squeaking and clash of shunting trucks, and the letting off of steam, and the great clang of the bells that are sounded from the engines as a trans-continental train comes in—all those sounds of life and hustle that are dear to the Canadian soul.
MOUNT LEFROY. CANADIAN ROCKIES.
The train I was waiting for entered slowly with the usual peal of bells. All the blinds were drawn in the sleeping-carriages; and the only sign of life from them was the protruded woolly head, here and there, of a negro car conductor. I think I was the only person who got in.
'What a lot of people,' I said to myself as I sat down in an empty smoking compartment, and shivering lit a pipe, 'would envy the prospects of a man about to spend days and perhaps weeks in the heart of the Rockies.' 'What a lot of people,' myself replied to me, 'would see the Rockies further before they got out of bed at this unholy hour.'
My pipe held the balance between us and gradually soothed the rebellious part of me. It was still too dark to see anything, and there was nothing to be done but wait patiently for the dawn. I could not but regret that I was missing the scenery of the foothills, for which those who have lived among them seem to have a peculiar affection. But I was consoled by the entry a little later of two fellow-passengers, who had evidently been disturbed in their sleep and wanted smoke and conversation. Strange and various types one sees in a Westbound train. The West is still—even to the Canadian born—the Unknown and the Happy Hunting-grounds and Eldorado and Ultima Thule and the Blessed Isles. West is where the farmer's son of spirit goes to seek fresh lands, where the prospector goes to find gold, where successful men go because they want to be more successful, or maybe because they want to retire and enjoy themselves, and they have heard that West there is a climate which hardly includes winter, and has none at all of that fierce break-up of winter which makes the plains in parts trying to the toughest constitution; where the failures go because they have tried all other places, and the last is {173} West. All sorts of other men may be seen going West too—bank clerks and lumbermen, commercial travellers and engineers, tourists and politicians, trappers and amateurs of sport. But I never saw a more strangely assorted pair than these two men who came into the smoking compartment where I sat as the train mounted the foothills.
One was a very old man. I do not know what his profession was, but his clothes and himself were equally weather-stained and dirty. He had the coarsest snow-white hair hanging in cords about his neck and cheeks and mouth, which gave him the appearance of a vicious old billy-goat. He was, I discovered, a moderately vicious old man. The other was a lumberjack—hardly more than a boy, sturdy, and strikingly handsome, with the clearest blue eyes and a complexion that a woman would give a fortune for. The old man—as they came in together—was already engaged in telling the young one what you might call a backwoods smoking-room story, and he went on with others even thicker, over which the young one betrayed the hugest amusement. What particularly won his laughter and admiration was the fact that so elderly a person should enter into such topics with {174} so much zest. I can still hear him repeating, 'There ain't many fellows as old as you, Daddy, that 'ud be such sports. No, sir.'
And the old man would grin and chuckle at the compliment, and become more highly improper in the warmth of the boy's praise. He became indeed so elevated by it—especially after the boy had got up once or twice and executed a brief step-dance to mark the exuberance of his delight—that, thinking to gain even more glory by being still more startling, he dropped the subject of women and took up that of religion. It seemed he was an atheist of the old three-shots-a-penny variety, and he went for Christianity hot and strong. He had, it must be admitted, a perfectly skilled command of the old cheap arguments, and marshalled them in good order. Only, the unexpected happened. The boy, who had not minded being boyishly wicked, was plainly shocked by this new thing, and he said so in language so warm that a minister of the faith he was defending would have felt positively faint to hear it. The old man, surprised and still more annoyed, brought out further iconoclastic arguments, excellently directed. It is true any theologian could have warded them off easily enough. Any {175} debater could have. But it was clear that the boy had never argued in his life. That didn't matter. He was not going to sit there and listen to that sort of thing. He got indeed quite hopelessly confused; intellectually he was tripped time and again; he deferred with a lamb's innocence to the old man's boasts of having perused Persian literature, Hebrew literature, all the books that have to do with Buddhism and Zoroastrianism (I am afraid I did not believe any of this); he allowed that so much learning and thought must be a fine thing, but not an inch did he yield of his creed. And the more the old man got at him with arguments the more sulphurous grew the boy's language. I have never known so queer a Defender of the Faith as that lumberjack—or in a way a more successful one. His manner was childlike, his words unprintable; he made a muddle whenever he attempted to follow the simplest of the old villain's inferences. Yet never the least shake could his opponent give him, and his dogged reiteration of the statement that 'A man by —— could only stick to the —— faith that he had, and Daddy was a —— fool to think his that —— arguments made any difference'—wore the old free-thinker out in {176} the end. He did not give in, but he gave up: a wiser but, it is to be feared, not a better old man.
Meanwhile we were getting into the hills, and my first impressions were rather of great rocks than of mountains. Most people, I suppose, come upon the Rockies first from the east, and they seem tremendous if only for the reason that one has come upon them after days spent in those plains which, even while they rise, rise imperceptibly. But tremendous as they seem from the east, they must be far more so from the north, and far more beautiful from the west. On the east the mountains have less height than on the north. Their timber is poor by comparison with the trees that grow further west; their valleys have little of the luxuriance of the Pacific valleys. One feels a certain coldness and hardness about them, and after a little while there seems almost a monotony of corrugated peaks, all thrown together and slanting eastward. They are striking enough even so, and the view from the train, especially when one considers that railways are run through mountains by the easiest route not by the finest, and that grades have to be counted before landscapes, cannot disappoint anybody.
Comparisons with the Alps and the Himalayas should be kept till the Rockies have been seen at closer quarters. The finest view I ever had of the Rockies was from a mountain in the Selkirks, at a height of over ten thousand feet, and over a hundred miles from the nearest railway. There I forgot to make comparisons, which after all are somewhat useless. It is easy to say that the Alps are softer and more pictorial—showing that deep blue sky above their snows, which is rarely if ever to be seen in the Rockies. The Canadian skies are too lofty and distant ever to seem to be resting even on the topmost snowfields. The Himalayas again have giants unparalleled. Kinchinjunga, leaning out of the clouds, cannot be matched among the Rockies. But the Rockies—well, the Rockies are different. As yet we are only just getting to Banff.
Everybody stops at Banff. The popular places of the world are not necessarily the most beautiful; and even if they start beautiful, they are not rendered more so by the accretion in their midst of a large number of even first-class hotels. Perhaps first-class hotels increase the feeling for beauty. Indeed the sole defence of luxury worth consideration is that it has this effect. Without luxury, would there exist such an appreciator of beauty as d'Annunzio, to name but one? Pardon, I am getting away from Banff.
It is a very beautiful watering-place at the foot of mountains. It is not spoilt yet, and it will be difficult to spoil it. The air is superb. I learnt that just as I was getting into it on my way from the station. I seemed to be the only person walking into it that morning—except for a local Canadian who was going in to his work. It was still very {179} early in the morning, and distinctly cold, and I said to this Canadian workman:
'It's pretty cold at Banff.'
'It's the finest air in Canada,' he replied, with that characteristic touch of resentment of anything that might be taken as a criticism of his native heath, which every Canadian invariably shows. 'Yes, sir, it's the finest air in Canada, and they're putting down concrete sidewalks.'
He was, as a matter of fact, engaged in that work himself, and after I had expressed a proper admiration of it, he became friendly enough and directed me to the hotel I wanted to stay in.
I wish it had not rained at Banff while I was there. It was an unusually cold and early rain, and it prevented me from seeing many of the sights of the place. The motor boat, which as a rule runs several times a day up the Bow River, did not run at all while I was there, and so I did not see this lovely valley. Nor did I take much stock of the buffaloes of the National Park, which are one of the greatest features of Banff, one that tourists with cameras always make for first. Rain was the reason of my abstention. On the other hand, the rain was the immediate {180} cause of my spending a most delightful afternoon in a hot sulphur swimming-bath. There are three such baths in Banff, and I chose the upper one, walking two miles up a winding road, whose woods were beginning to show all the reds of autumn, to get to it. I found that it was an open-air bath, fed by a sulphur stream that trickles steaming down the face of a mountain, and since no one had been tempted there on so gloomy a day, I had it all to myself, and swam up and down in water that varied from 110° to 95° for an hour or more, looking at the hilltops opposite, and the mists that rose and sank about them. The rain and the cold mattered nothing so long as I swam there, wondering if luxury could go further in this world of ours. For there I was lapped about with all the warmth and peace that come to the beach-comber or the lotus-eater, and yet drinking in the brisk mountain air and feeling the challenge of the hills. It was to combine the emotions of a man climbing the Alps with the emotions of a man squatting in a Turkish bath; and only when the latter threatened to become rather the stronger of the two, did I get out, feeling weak but fresh. I had the pleasure while dressing of reading in a printed advertisement {181} of the baths that I had been curing myself of rheumatism, sciatica, asthma, anæmia, insomnia and, I fancy, any other disease I might happen to have latent. Certainly I felt well and uncommonly drowsy when I got back to the hotel. Indeed those who intend to explore Banff with energy would be well advised to postpone the baths till their last day. There is plenty to explore. The National Park alone is 5400 square miles in extent, and encloses half a dozen subsidiary ranges of the Rocky Mountains; and if Banff is to be regarded as the centre for mountain climbing, fishing, and big game hunting, there is of course no end to it. Guide-books mention in a vague way that it is such a centre—which only means that if you want to do any of these things from a highly civilised and comfortable hotel, you had better make Banff your stopping place. Good climbing is to be had quite near, but whether the same is to be said for shooting or fishing depends upon whether anything short of the best in these matters is good. You cannot expect fish and big game to remain centralised. Particularly is this the case with big game. They avoid the centre of things, and prefer to keep on the circumference. In these sort of matters {182} guide-books are very little use. Nowhere do conditions change more rapidly than in Canada, and the man who wants big-horn or big trout will have to make for the circumference too. But there he will neither expect nor find first-class hotels.
Speaking of first-class hotels, I took part—quite an unwilling part—in an incident that goes to show some of the difficulties attendant upon trying to run them in Canada. Frankly, except for those run by the Canadian Pacific Railway, there are practically none. It is not to be wondered at. Cookery is an art, like literature or music, not greatly encouraged in a new country. Take waiters again. Though the wages they make are good and the standard of waiting expected from them is rarely the highest, I believe they are a perennial difficulty to hotel proprietors. On the trains and in the big towns in the East one usually finds that the waiters are Englishmen not long out; and they are so not because they have acquired the science of waiting in the old country (as one might suppose, since it is usually well learnt there), but because they have not as yet acquired that Canadian spirit which makes anything savouring of domestic service—or even of undue courtesy as from man to {183} man—distasteful to the Canadian born, who, in any case, dislikes working for uncertainly long hours. Englishmen, it has to be admitted, are not particularly zealous for long and uncertain hours of work either in these days; and therefore it generally happens that as soon as the newcomer is the least acclimatised, he, too, drops waiting if he has taken it up. In the East a freshly arrived immigrant takes his place; but in the West there is no such constant supply of spare white men. The result is that Western hotels are more or less driven to employ as waiters either women or Japanese and Chinese boys.
The hotel I stayed in at Banff had a staff of the former. Heaven knows we have women waiters enough in England, but in Canada I do not think heaven can know.... As soon as I came in to breakfast in the morning I became aware of a sharp-featured maiden with eyeglasses and tight lips and stiff white cuffs—very much the type of the Girton girl in the older times—who was clearly in charge of the room, and meant to let every one know it. I shrank down at the nearest table, and in a hushed voice requested and received my breakfast from one of the waitresses who were theoretically in attendance. She was very kindly, {184} only she brought me tea instead of coffee. I wanted coffee. I felt it was taking a risk, but as a man at his breakfast usually prefers his own fancy to other people's, I looked about delicately to see if I could catch my waitress's eye and induce her to change the pot. By bad fortune I merely caught the eye of the sharp young lady who, coming up and learning from my unwilling lips that I had been given the wrong drink, said imperiously:
'Kindly tell me which of the girls gave you this!'
Now I had not particularly noticed the girl who had been good enough to help me—an inexcusable carelessness—which the sharp young woman evidently interpreted as a desire to fence with her, for while I hesitated she went on:
'I'll tell you why I want to know. There's some game on this morning——'
'Oh,' I said, 'yes.'
'And I'm not going to stand it,' said the sharp young woman fiercely. 'I fired two of the girls yesterday, and I don't mind if I fire the lot, so if you'll tell me which of them brought you this I'll see to her straight away.'
'I'm afraid I should not know her again,' I said hastily. A scene of strife around my {185} unlucky person, while breakfast got cold and all the other guests at the other tables looked on, was terrible to my fancy. The sharp one seemed most disappointed.
'I wish you could,' she said. 'I'd fix her right now.'
'Quite impossible,' I murmured, hoping that I was speaking the truth. Not so far off there was a young woman, standing chatting genially with two men at another table, who might have brought me that tea.
'Oh, well, of course if you can't,' said the sharp one, and presently brought me coffee with her own fair white-cuffed hands. I thanked her warmly, and she went away; after which I was rewarded for my supposed chivalry by the young woman who had been entertaining those other two men coming up to me and saying in a sweet voice:
'I say, I'm awfully sorry that I brought you that tea instead of coffee. The fact is we're awfully rushed this morning.'
'Not at all,' I said, 'don't think of it,' and hoped inwardly that she would go away before the sharp one spotted her and bore down upon us. She did not seem so rushed as she had said.
'Sure you won't have anything else now?' she persisted in the kindliest way.
'No, thank you,' I said, and seeing, I suppose, that I was not an entertaining person, she flitted gracefully away to a third table where another male sat, to whom I heard her whisper in passing—on the way to further chat with the other two men:
'Now, mind you don't forget to meet me outside the hotel at six sharp!'
My sympathies almost went out to the sharp-visaged spinster, for really there were quite a number of guests looking about them for food while the rushed staff chatted freely and pleasantly with such male visitors as seemed by their bearing to be worthy of being fascinated. This at breakfast-time—breakfast-time when an Englishman at all events wants food and would not be put off by the conversation of Cleopatra or Helen of Troy. Canadians may be a more gallant race at this hour of the day, but I am not sure of this. The preponderance of Japanese waiters as one gets further West seems to point to the fact that even they prefer food—at meal-times—to sentiment. The Japanese may demand high wages, and leave their places suddenly if they feel like it, but at least they do not threaten one with an emotional scene over one's morning coffee. Nor do I imagine that they require to be treated by their {187} employers with quite that reverential respect of which I remember seeing an example in a small hotel in the Columbia Valley. I was stopping at the hotel over Sunday with a friend, and as we wanted to go out for the day, we asked the manager if we could be supplied with some sandwiches for lunch. He was a mild and obliging young man, but his face fell.
'I'll—I'll see what can be done,' he said, and I heard him go to the young lady who vouchsafed to wait at table occasionally in a superior way. 'My God!' I heard him say in an extremely humble voice to her, 'I'm most awfully sorry to ask such a thing of you, but these chaps want to go out and take some sandwiches. I say, do you suppose it could be managed?'
We got two sandwiches each as a result of his intercession, and in that mountain air we could have done with six times the number. But we realised from the manager's face when he brought them to us that the goddess who had provided them might, instead of doing so, have stalked straight out of the hotel for good.
Few books are complete nowadays without a chapter on the woman question. Man can be treated of in between; one would not as yet care to write a book without mentioning man in it. As a subsidiary agent for keeping the world going man is still not without his importance. But woman, as I have said, must have a chapter to herself. And since I unwittingly arrived on the last page at the subject of woman's work in Canada, I will pause—even on the threshold of the mountains—and go further into the matter.
The most noticeable thing about woman in Western Canada is that she has not yet arrived there. If any one wished to get an idea of how the world would arrange itself supposing there were no women in it at all, they would have to go a little further north and west, into some of the British Columbian valleys or into the Yukon country, and look around.
What a simple world it seems. No clothes question, no washing, the simplest cookery, one man one plate (and that plate never washed), one knife for eating with or for skinning a grizzly bear, no carpets or curtains in the houses, no dustings or spring-cleanings, no knick-knacks to knock over or break, no flowers without or within except such as grow wild, no luxuries, in short, either to enjoy or to pay for, and a terrible amount of dirt. That is the physical aspect of the world without women.
The spiritual side of it is less easy to arrive at. These bachelors you see in the backwoods are a silent people, lacking in self-consciousness, and, I daresay, in manners, but law-abiding and amiable and peculiarly handy. All men are handy who have not women to steal that talent from them; and most womenless men are silent too. One knows, of course, that bores may be found among men at times, but never chatterboxes. There is something to be said for the view that speech arose by women putting questions so often that men were driven, in sheer weariness, to make answers.
Does it seem an unattractive life that these hardy bachelors have perforce to live? Perhaps. But you will not find them bemoaning {190} their lot. That is not the way of bachelors. We know they are to be pitied, but they do not pity themselves. Seriously, the trouble with these men is that they have none of those inducements to consider the future which make a man better than a machine. They take the world as it comes, which is well enough for themselves but not well enough for the world. I doubt if it is well for themselves really. True, they have nothing to worry them so long as they are in health. They can make big money when they choose and take holidays when they choose, conscious that when their money is spent they have only to set to again. Their wages are indeed to them little more than trinkgeld—and this means that those splendid workers have no real reward for their work, leave no successors to carry on the traditions of their toil, enrich only the bar-keepers and the rogues who live on the folly of honest men.
Clearly the most honourable opening for women in Canada is marriage. Only wives are capable of putting down the drink curse, preventing the growth of a particularly odious plutocracy, establishing a permanent instead of a nomad population in the West. Nor might it be a bad thing (but for Anglo-Saxon {191} prejudices) if provincial governments there could start marriage offices, due attention being paid to eugenics. Even in so small a matter as the following, the presence of wives should make all the difference. All down the Columbia valley I found the cattle ranchers, who were bachelors, drinking tinned milk, while scores of cows ran wild and went dry. When I asked if it wasn't worth while to keep one cow milking, I was always told, 'No, we haven't time to bother about it,' till I came to the shack of a married Swede, whose wife had time to bother about it. In his shack tinned milk was anathema, as it should be everywhere.
As prejudice would undoubtedly prevent the formation of governmental marriage offices, marriage can only be considered as an indirect opening for women. What are the directer openings? A great deal depends on what part of Canada immigrant women make for. In the East there is no such lack of women as in the West. The sexes are fairly balanced. In the big towns there is the usual demand for domestic servants, but not many more openings for educated Englishwomen than there are in big towns at home. There are a few more, because those cities are going at a faster pace than our English cities, and because all work there is {192} more valuable than in England. Women skilled in the arts that have to do with personal decoration, such as millinery, dressmaking, etc., could make their way there.
Factory work in Canada is hardly worth going into here, the chief point about it being that wages are of course higher; nor did I notice any unusual professions engaging the attention of women, unless it were the checking of parcels and the playing in hotel orchestras, neither of which requires a man's strength.
French Canada offers employment to but very few. Western Canadians sniff at the Habitants because they let their women work in the fields; haymaking and hoeing. But the idea of using women as outdoor workers is not so uncivilised as it looks to those unaccustomed to seeing it. Ethnologists are agreed nowadays that the tribes in which women do the fieldwork are not the least but the most civilised, and maintain that the position of women among such tribes is higher than among any others. Women began to work out-of-doors because the primitive peoples believed in a connection between their fertility and that of the earth; and where they do such work, women are always the keepers of the grain store—hold in their hands, that is to say, the {193} food upon which the life of the tribe depends. The most honourable primitive customs are not always the best in modern times, but there can be no doubt of the fertility of the French Canadians.
As one goes West, woman becomes more of an indoor creature; and this may be due to the greater chivalry of their men folk. But one has to remember that the great charm of Canadian life, especially on the prairies, is an outdoor charm—working in the exhilarating air—not cooking over a hot stove indoors. One hears of a few cases in which women have taken up farming or vegetable-gardening and made a success of it, but no one could honestly say that the fortune awaiting women who take up such work is usually a great one. The work is too hard, especially in the winter time. Chicken-ranching is perhaps easier; but the real demand in the West is for women to do that housework which the men have not time for. At such work capable women can earn from three to five pounds a month with board and lodging; and while they are likely to find it rather harder—certainly not less hard—than similar work at home, it has compensations besides the money to be made by it. For one thing there is none of the odium that attaches {194} to it in the older countries. The cook is as good as her employer, who probably did the cook's work for years before the cook was to be had. It is natural that the work which most ladies have to do for themselves, because neither love nor money can obtain them substitutes, should lose its menial and unpleasant aspect, and the finest ladies in western Canada do it unashamed. Often their guests will help them to wash up, and even prepare the dinner. Personally, I found myself becoming quite expert at cleaning fish for a hostess who thereafter cooked it and dished it up, and yet appeared at table as fresh and elegant and apparently leisured as any lady who keeps a staff of servants in the old country. And I found as I got on that I rather liked cleaning fish.
It stands to reason that the lady help is not wanted. The precise duties demanded of such a lady are always a little misty, but I imagine that they include a little sewing and a little reading, the ability to chat pleasantly, to be good-tempered (and possibly a Protestant), to feed the canary, and, at a pinch, even to clean out its cage. None of these talents are needed in a new country, and I heard of forty women who were on the books of an employment {195} office in Calgary, all wanting to be lady helps and all likely to go on wanting it till Doomsday.
One hears a good deal of discussion (not in Canada) of the openings in the colonies for educated women. There is an English committee—the Committee of Colonial Intelligence for Educated Women—which, 'recognising the crying need of our colonies for the best type of educated women,' undertakes to furnish them with detailed, practical and up-to-date information, before advising them to go out. This committee hopes later on to found settlements in the colonies, where training, suitable to the needs of each colony, can be given, and centres can be formed to which the girls can return in the intervals of employment. There is much sense both in the recognition of the need for educated women in the colonies and in the perception that the most educated woman will be lost there unless she is prepared to be practical. The truth is that that same adaptability which is required of men in Canada is required of women also. They must first suit the country before they can hope to leave their mark on it. Educated women can leave their mark there by their inward, not by their outward, superiority.
Centres to which the girls can go in the first {196} place, and to which they can return in the intervals of employment, are an excellent idea, and one which central or local government authorities in Canada would do well to support. Of course the Young Women's Christian Association already gives much help in this direction, but it cannot be expected to have branches everywhere. New towns and settlements are planned and put through very quickly in Canada, and wherever they result in creating a demand for women's work, some such centre for girls as near the railway depot as possible should be started. For one thing it would facilitate the engagement of girls, for another it would attract a better class. Probably the best openings of all for women in Canada—educated women, I mean—are in the big cities of the furthest West. In Vancouver and Victoria wealthy people reside who can afford to pay for such luxuries as private school-mistresses and governesses. And the supply of women is not so great there. Women also seem to be more employed there as hotel manageresses and under-manageresses, and as cashiers in hotels and offices. I never heard of women being real estate agents, but in a profession in which the arts of persuasion play a leading part, there seems no reason why they {197} should not shine. Of bachelor girls, living their own lives, I have also never heard in the West. They could hardly have the hearts to do it with so many bachelor men wasting their lives around them.
On the whole, the position of woman in Canada is one of honourable toil lightened by the high consideration in which they are held. They have hardly as yet obtained that dominant super-man eminence which American women are said to occupy. That is, perhaps, because they have not gone in so much for that culture and social fastidiousness by the lack of which in themselves some American husbands are made to feel their inferiority. On the other hand they seem to keep their men folk contented, and remain contented with them. Divorce is, I believe, uncommon in Canada.
Who thinks the Rockies only of a forbidding magnificence, of a grandeur always dark and fierce? Let him go to Lake Louise. The only phrase I know that fits it is that German one—märchenhaft schön—lovely as a scene of fairyland. Coming upon it suddenly, on a moonlight night, it seems so unlooked-for, so exquisite, that one says to oneself, 'Surely it will vanish like a dream.'
It is quite a little lake, shut in for the most part by hills. The hills are wooded at their base, and wooded high up—wooded, indeed, right into the clouds; but higher still they turn to bare walls of rock or snow-strewn peaks, where the snow and the flowers grow side by side. Up among the heights other little lakes lie—the Lakes in the Clouds, they are called—and sometimes they are in the clouds and sometimes not, and they are coloured like thick opals and moonstones, and you can see {199} the tall, slim firs growing at the bottom as if they were real trees and not only reflections. I think it is the colours of these lakes that are so fairy-like. People may say of the Rockies that they never give the contrast of white snow-fields and deep blue sky that is so marked in the Swiss and Italian Alps, but what of that? The colours they do yield are, in truth, far more delicate and varied—perhaps because the Canadian skies are so much loftier and farther away—and, if you do not believe it, go and look at the waters of Lake Louise. They are distilled from peacocks' tails and paved with mother-of-pearl, and into them rush those wild blues that are only mixed in the heart of glaciers.
Across the end of the lake stretches the hotel garden—green turf crossed by one great border of Iceland poppies, golden and orange, fringing the water front. One other plant I should have liked to see growing there—the opal anchusa. Its colour is so exactly the colour of the lake, in sun and in shadow. Still, more colour is hardly needed anywhere round Lake Louise. As I have said, the very snows are gay when you get to them, and pied with flowers, as old English meadows used to be when old English poets used that word, before {200} scientific farming came in and determined that flowers were weeds and killed them. And I had thought of these valleys as black and frowning, full of melancholy noises among the trees, rather than windless and radiant.
The station for Lake Louise is Laggan, and the time to arrive there is in the evening, just before the moon rises. It does not matter if the drive up from the station is accomplished in the dark. The road is wooded and beautiful, but do not wish for the moon till the last bend of it leads you suddenly on to the lake. Then wish for the moon hard. Or, if you want to make sure of it, and the moon (though it seems always magical in its uprising) follows laws like other things and will not rise unless it is due to, make cold calculations some time ahead, and be sure they are right. There never could be anything better worth timing than moonrise on Lake Louise.
If the poppied air that was fabled to pervade certain lovely places in the old world hung about this region, there would be no coming away from it. You would remain gazing drowsily for ever at the lake like the lover on the Greek urn that Keats described. But all around are the mountains which distil an air keen and exhilarating, so that before you know {201} it you are set walking, or riding or climbing—in some way adventuring forth. Some people adventure forth in a carriage, but that is rather too like going out to battle in evening clothes.
Myself, having but two days at my disposal—which I could very well have spent looking across the Iceland poppies at the lake—was urged by the air and a sense of duty to take a long walk the first day and a longish ride the second. For this second expedition I hired a mountain pony and decided to reach the Moraine Lake, which lies at the end of The Valley of the Ten Peaks. It was my first experience of a Rocky Mountain pony, and I will state at once that it was an unfavourable one. There exist, no doubt, a few excellent mountain ponies. I bestrode one or two later in different places. But this first one was so dispiriting that he warped my mind concerning the whole breed. The truth is that mountain ponies, being intended for the average tourist who seems to be not much of a rider, are both bred and trained to go no faster, and exhibit no more spirit than a bath-chair man. Not theirs to trot or canter, even if a smooth stretch of road present itself. Enough if they move steadily up mountain trails and along mountain {202} ledges and down precipitous tracks in a manner designed to make the tourist feel that mules are stumbling creatures by comparison. Enough in one way but not in another, for to emulate a baser creature corrupts the best-bred pony in the world. Ponies have that much of humanity in them. Besides, it is not worth while to breed the best ponies for such work; and, further and anyway, a mountain pony is, so to say, a contradiction in species. A pony as much as a horse is a creature of the plains; place him in the mountains and he becomes something different—scarcely a pony at all. He is then an animal that picks up his feet in a marvellous way, is free from mountain sickness and the faintness that comes from high altitudes, and carries a pack or a person on his back. But he is no longer the friend of man. He is merely the tool of the tourist.
We started downhill—that pony and I—directly after lunch. Words—words—words. I mounted that pony directly after lunch. The road led downhill in the first instance. I tried to start the pony in that direction. That is a truer description of what actually happened. But after I had got his head set towards the Ten Peaks Valley, he slewed it round again. We had not by any means {203} started. 'He is frightened of the hill,' I thought to myself, and redirected his head, encouraging him with words and reins. I had no whip. The owners of these hired mountain ponies seem to think whips unnecessary, and, indeed, they are very little use. I tried one cut from the roadside some five minutes later. We had by that time made about a hundred yards. I beat him also with his own reins and my heels, and we accomplished about a quarter of a mile downhill, going delicately. I said to myself, 'Patience. The descent will soon be over. The road then rises. We shall see a different animal.'
What I saw when we came, by sideways and prolonged efforts, to the first part of the ascent, was that, greatly as that pony hated a down-hill grade, far more did he loathe an uphill one. We mounted it at what seemed to be a mile an hour or less, and I groaned to think that we had eight or nine to accomplish before we got to the lake, and the same in returning. By late afternoon I judged we had made the half distance and were still going weakly. I had cut two or three different sticks by now, and encouraged the pony with different words from those I had used at the start. He woke up once or twice and trotted for a moment. {204} The road was not really steep for most of the way; where it was steep I walked, dragging the pony behind me. He did not seem to mind whether I was on his back or off, provided no motion was required of him. I found it was cooler work to get off and pull him than to propel him from the saddle. Always he stood still for choice.
The road was good—good underfoot and good to observe from. On our left lay a broad valley, and on our right the hills. I should love to have paused voluntarily and absorbed the views, but in point of fact I only paused in passion to cut whips; the pony, meanwhile, grazing. He knew the road to the Moraine Lake better than I did, and he contested every inch of it.
I think I was aware long before the Ten Peaks came into sight that I should not reach the lake that day—or perhaps ever; but I was determined that I would at least see where it lay, though the sun set.
We came within sight of it at last. Before then the Ten Peaks had come into line one by one till there they stood, ten white peaks all in a row. At their base I thought I saw the lake lying, very still and cold among its ice-worn pebbles.
IN THE VALLEY OF THE TEN PEAKS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS.
If I did not see it, if it was but a mirage, I do not greatly care. I achieved something more that afternoon than the mere sight of a lake. I got that pony back to the hotel almost in time for dinner. I was pretty stiff in the arms. It was not to be wondered at. Hauling a pony nine miles is no light work.
Emerald Lake is beautiful, but less beautiful, I think, than Lake Louise. It is more like a lake among mountains, and less like a lake in a dream. I went to it because I wanted to get into the Yoho Valley, if only for a day, and the trail from Emerald Lake into the Yoho is, I had heard, the most picturesque of all. Even superficially to see the valley takes four days, and I had left myself with only one, so that it was in a deprecating spirit that I asked the manageress of the lake chalet if I could at least get within sight of the valley and back before dark. She said that if I started at two o'clock punctually, on a pony, the thing could just be done. I said that I had tried one or two mountain ponies, and did not care about them when I was in a hurry.
'Oh, but I'll give you a slicker,' said the manageress. 'You see there's no run on {207} the ponies at present, and I'll ask the man to give you his very best. He'll just get you there and back in time.'
I thanked her and said I would try the slicker; and, half an hour later, the slicker and I were skirting the wooded shore of the Emerald Lake at what was, for a mountain pony, quite a fast trot. We were alone together. There were a few guests at the chalet, but the lateness of the season and the snow-clouds that loomed on the horizon had deterred any of them from starting on the Yoho Valley trip that day. Earlier in the year, there would have been quite a party riding together with a guide in the direction I was taking, for there are four camps in the valley, placed at picturesque points an easy day's ride apart, where you may rest and sleep, one night beneath a waterfall, the next on the edge of a glacier, with the ponies tethered round, and the camp-fires crackling pleasantly, so that you feel that you are pioneering, but pioneering luxuriously.
But now, as I have said, it was late in the season, and the snow-clouds were holding themselves in the sky ready for further attacks, and a keen wind was beginning to rise, so that no one else thought the Yoho Valley {208} tempting enough, and it was certain I should have it all to myself if I got there.
The trail was not difficult to follow. There, at the end of the lake, was a mountain pass visible from the chalet, and the thin white line that screwed about among the rocks and trees was the trail. The slicker trotted. He trotted through the wood that borders the lake; he trotted through a wonderful pebbled valley beyond it which might have been a sea beach (only everywhere slim spruces, like sharp, green, tenpenny nails, grew out of the pebbles); and he trotted up the first stretch of trail leading to the pass ahead of us. Then for an hour or more the slicker climbed as steadily as a Swiss guide. The trail was less than a yard wide and metalled with rolling stones, and though it wound continually, its most generous spirals left it, to my fancy, almost sheer. We wound with it, past boulders and hanging trees and little cataracts that shot through air from some invisible lips of stone above—between shadowy crags and over unprotected places where the sun glared. In the end the slicker brought me to the pass itself, and we rode into a dark wood there, and the trees grew bigger and bigger, and the trail grew stickier and stickier, and the {209} pass ended suddenly, and below, far, far below, was the Yoho Valley.
The story of the boy who cried 'wolf' when there was no wolf is a familiar one, but much more familiar in everyday life is the story of the man who cries 'lion' when there is no lion. You know him and you don't believe him. You know that, moved by the immoderate enthusiasm which is the chief qualification for the profession of writing, he is doing his level best to make you believe that the object he is presenting to you is a lion, for the simple reason that if you believe it, you will be more attracted by it and him. Canada, being a much-advertised country at present, is full of lions. 'The finest view in Canada. Yes, sir.' How often I heard that remark! How often it turned out to be an overstatement. How distrustfully I came to listen to it.
Was it, then, that for some months I had imbibed the Canadian air, that when I reached the Rockies I too was carried away, and became as immoderately enthusiastic as any Canadian? I do not know. I merely have to confess that I was carried away, that I have already cried 'lion' more than once, and that I must do so once again now that I have got to the Yoho Valley. Baedeker saves his own dignity—and {210} that of literature—by using an asterisk at these critical points, or two asterisks if his emotions are very poignant. But I, who have to fill paper, must use words. Well, I am not afraid of exaggerating the beauties of the Yoho. This valley of enormous trees spiring up from unseen gorges to wellnigh unseen heights; of cataracts that fall in foam a thousand feet; of massed innumerable glaciers; this valley into which it seems you could drop all Switzerland, and still look down—is not easily overpraised. The difficulty is to praise it at all adequately.
It seemed to me as I rode on along the high trail that sometimes edged out to the gulf below and sometimes swerved back from it, that one of the wonders of the valley was a thing that in smaller places would have made for disappointment, and that is that it lies, and always has lain, outside the human radius. It has none of those connections with men that set us thrilling in other parts. No Hannibal ever led his army by this route across these mountains. No hardy tribesmen watched the approach of an enemy among its crags, or bred among them a race of mountaineers. No gods dwelt on its heights, and no poets ever came near to sing them. History {211} has nothing to tell of it. Little hills and little valleys have their stories and their songs, their memories and their miracles. They are haunted still with those forgotten mysteries which stir men's fancies more deeply than things remembered or discovered can. This valley walled about with mountains has been above and beyond men's ken from the beginning of the world: and now that men have come into it, they find nothing to discover in it except its vastness and immunity from the touch of men. It strikes one even now as not only devoid of human adjuncts but needless of them. A man no more looks for legends there than he would look for them in the centre of a typhoon.
I suppose that men did pass through it—even before the valley became a known part of the world, and even a sight for tourists. It was not, as the phrase goes, untrodden by the foot of man. A few prospectors must have passed this way from time to time many years ago. Some may have died there for all one knows. Indian hunters, too, would enter the valley in pursuit of game. But no one possessed it; no one gave it the human air: or, if they did, the records are lost. Prospectors tell us only of their finds, nothing {212} of their lives. Of the Indians, some one someday may, perhaps, find some traces. At present their white brothers are little troubled by them or their history or their origin. Canadians are content to think of them as a primitive, decaying people who came from God knows where to a country they never realised was God's. It will be easier to forget them than to understand them, these strange men with faces no more expressive than wood, who, if they ever came to the Yoho Valley, must have passed through it more like trees walking among the trees than like men that stop and wonder, and leave a habitation and a name.
Shadowy, disregardable creatures, then, as uninfluential as the slicker and myself, may have roamed the valley in times past and left no more traces upon it. We two realising, I trust, our minuteness and unimportance, went on, as it turned out, far beyond the point intended for our afternoon's excursion. In contemplation of the valley I had given the slicker the rein, and he, poor pony, no doubt thought that he was bound for the first camp, there to rest the night in the ordinary course. Presently I found him, his two front feet planted firmly together, sliding down the {213} slipperiest piece of trail we had yet encountered, sliding and sliding till we had got to the very bottom of the valley—whereupon I discovered that we had indeed attained the first camp.
It was a queer, unexpected sight—a few little lean-to tents and a couple of log huts, standing side by side on a flat piece of the valley floor, just beyond the spray of a cascade that dropped from ledge to ledge of the mountain opposite, starting so high up that it seemed to spring from the sky. The place seemed deserted, but while the slicker and I paused to look about us, out of the biggest tent there came a small, silent, yellow figure. It did not speak to me, but only stared, and I, having stared back for a little and having wondered if it were some gnome peculiar to the valley, suddenly saw that it had a pigtail, and remembered that I had been told that there was a Chinese cook in every camp.
'Is this the first camp?' I therefore asked.
'Yup!'
'Can you give me some tea?'
'Yup!' he repeated, and vanished into the tent whence he had come.
By the time I had tethered the slicker on the grassiest spot I could find, that boy had {214} tea ready. He stared at me while I ate it, stared at me when I paid him for it, and stared at me when, having offered the slicker some bread and sugar in vain, I remounted him and set him on the homeward trail. I had not a watch with me. But it was evident from the position of the sun that we had very little daylight left for the return ride. Dusk, indeed, came on just as we reached the other side of the pass, with a mountain side still to descend. Dusk and an exceedingly cold wind—in the face of which that corkscrew trail seemed doubly steep. It was one of those occasions when vowing candles to one's patron saint might have added to one's peace of mind. But I have no patron saint and could but give the reins to the slicker, and he rewarded me for my trust by not falling down till we had actually accomplished the descent and were on the pebbled beach. Then, in the pitch-dark night, we both rolled over together. A match, lighted with difficulty, revealed the fact that neither of us was injured; and so, very steadily and cautiously, we moved on to the chalet, where we arrived to find dinner finished. But we had seen splendid things, the slicker and I.
It would have been harder to leave the Rockies if I had not been bound for the Selkirks, which have this advantage over the Rockies, that they are perhaps less known. That part I was bound for is, indeed, not known at all to tourists, and very little known to anybody. The known part of the range lies round Glacier House, and includes Mount Abbott, the Great Illecillewaet Glacier, Mount Sir Donald, etc., which high places the railway has now made accessible for tourists who can climb. The part I was to see lies to the south-east, at the head of the Columbia Valley, and is at present a hundred miles from the nearest railway station.
First of all I took train to Golden. If you take a map of Canada and follow the trans-continental line westward, you will see that it emerges from the Rockies at Golden. Golden is a little mining town lying in the Columbia {216} Valley, with the Rockies on one side of it and the Selkirks on the other. It was chiefly to see this valley—one of the most fertile in British Columbia, but at present unopened—that I got out at Golden with a friend. An excursion into the Selkirks was to depend upon the time at our disposal. We had been told that near Lake Windermere, at a place called Wilmer, there was a great irrigation scheme in progress, which would shortly result in 60,000 acres of dry belt-land being ready for fruit-farming. This, when the rail from Kamloops to Golden was completed, would make the Columbia Valley as famous for its fruit as the Okanagan. We both wanted to see it. My friend wanted to buy land. The problem was how to get up the valley.
THE DEVIL'S FINGERS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS.
There were, we found, five different ways of doing the eighty miles from Golden to Wilmer.
1. The first was to wait for that day of the week on which the stage-coach ran. It took two days to do the distance, and was very convenient if we did not mind waiting in Golden a few days first. But we were in a hurry.
2. This way was by river-boat—a delightful trip. But there were one or two objections to it. The water of the Columbia was very {217} low at this time of the year, the sand-banks were numerous, and the boat had gone up some days before and nobody knew when it would get down again. We gave up the boat.
3. The third way, which we decided should be ours, was to go up in the only motor which Golden possessed. This would cost fifty dollars, but the journey there would only take about seven hours. When we had decided upon this, we went to the proprietor of the motor and found that the car was already out for an indefinite number of days.
4. This way was to walk the eighty miles—a plan I favoured and tried on the way back, as I shall describe. But my friend could not fancy it. Statelier than myself, he had to carry five more stones with him.
5. This was the way we took. We hired a two-horse rig which undertook to do the journey in the same time as the stage—but for twenty dollars apiece instead of five.
We started from Golden on a Monday morning in the two-horse rig, driven by a young American. He had been in the United States navy, and also in Alberta, farming, but he had had no luck with his farm, having started with too small a capital to tide over {218} the two bad seasons which he had met there. He told us that he found Canada very similar to the States—neither much better nor worse; and he took his own luck there philosophically. He seemed to me altogether a capable man, whose fortune might have been all the other way. Anyway he drove excellently and was not a grumbler, like the American ex-sailor I met at Regina.
Nothing could have been more beautiful than the late September morning when we started out of Golden. A spreading village of pretty poplar-lined avenues and pleasant bungalows, Golden explained its own name as we went. The wooded hills on either side were all splashed with autumn yellows, and the sun, striking down through a grove of silver poplars which shuts off the south end of the village, made it all seem shot with gold. It is a mining village, but compared with the usual mining village of Great Britain it seemed as Eden to the Inferno.
Coming out of it we struck what is the dominant scenery of the valley—the blue Columbia winding in and out, sometimes wooded to its brim, sometimes sweeping over into open marshland, but always with the hills lightly wooded, facing one another across it, and behind {219} them the white peaks hung with snow. At every mile or two a silvery creek, sometimes a mere ribbon of water, sometimes almost a river, rushed down to join the Columbia below; by the side of these creeks mostly would be the cleared land which small ranchers had settled, and where they had gone on living presumably on what they could grow off their own places, since the chances of reaching a market became obviously more difficult at every mile. Every wind of the road—and it mostly follows the river—gave views that were always changing and beautiful.
It was on the second day of our driving that the appearance of the valley grew different. The creeks became rarer; the soil drier. Instead of silver poplars rising among a tangled underbush, there were now jack-pines growing out of a burnt-up sward. We might have been going through some English park in the south country, and some one had evidently thought this before, for a man we met driving told us that this part of the valley was known as the Park. Passing through it we came at last to the real dry belt. Those who know the Okanagan would no doubt find it less strange, but it amazed me to find a country among these mountains almost Egyptian in its colouring and {220} texture. Drier and drier became the soil; the trees became sparser and sparser; there was now no underwood at all. The straight firs rose clear out of sandy hills and hollows. Sandy they might appear, but this was not sand in the vulgar sense. It was glacial silt—bottomless drifts of powdered clay that has slipped down from the mountains and piled and sloped itself into 'benches' above the river.
We had to cross the river to get to Wilmer, which is the headquarters of the irrigation. Headquarters sounds imposing; and in a few years, doubtless, Wilmer will be imposing, but at present it consists of a few shacks, two small stores, a dirty little hotel (in the bar of which a man was shot the day after we left), and one presiding genius who has made Wilmer what it is and also what it will be shortly. Need I say that it was a Scot who years ago saw the far-reaching value of this land, conceived the idea of irrigating it, and personally superintended the carrying out of his conception? I don't know that I need. I came to the conclusion before I left Canada that Scots, more than any other race, were at the bottom, and generally also at the top, of most of the enterprises that were being carried out there. No {221} one talks of the Scotticisation of Canada. Perhaps Scots do not proselytise. Perhaps they do not find any other people worthy of being taken into their community. They prefer to remain an international oligarchy, managing others but not admitting them to equal rights. They effect their intentions by usually working alone and always sticking together. A paradoxical people. It is amazing to think that at the beginning of the eighteenth century the Scottish Highlander was regarded by the average Englishman in much the same light as we now regard the Hottentot or the Andaman Islander, a hopelessly idle and uncouthly impossible person, destined to remain a barbarian for ever. Dis aliter visum. The Highlander now directs the Empire, distinguishing himself in that respect even more than his Lowland brother. Yet only two hundred years have passed since he was outside the pale.
My friend knew Mr. Randolph Bruce, the Highlander who presides over the Columbia Valley Irrigation Works, and will, it seems to me, rank as one of the many makers of Canada, and Mr. Bruce most hospitably put us up while we were in Wilmer, and showed us what he has done and what he means to do. What he means to do is to create a town on the shores {222} of Lake Windermere, and he drove us down there to show us the lake, which is not the least like its English original, but very beautiful nevertheless, lying as it does clear and still among the sand-hills, a belt of autumn-tinted trees around it, and, above, the hills and the snows. It looked like some African lake stretched at the feet of the Mountains of the Moon. It looked as if it might lie thus for centuries, silent and untouched by the hands of men. But it was a Canadian lake, and though it might seem to be at the very back of the world, it was shortly to have a town built on its shores. Mr. Bruce showed us the town site, the hotel site, the site of the bowling-green and the polo ground. I rather think he showed us the race-course that was going to be. I saw it all the more clearly because Mr. Bruce also showed us the work already actually accomplished—the canals and ditches that brought the upper mountain lakes down on to the benches of friable clay that were to grow the apples we shall eat in England a few years hence. It is all extraordinarily interesting, seeing this town of the future and these fruit-lands of the future—of which my friend bought twenty acres, which were to be named after him. The Columbia River ran just below the {223} bench-land he bought, and I wished I had some capital handy that I might buy the adjoining plot, that I might also grow fruit there and have a portion of the fair Dominion named after me. If the Windermere race-course had already been in existence, and a race being run, I should have backed one of the horses against all my principles, and laid out the proceeds in a fruit-farm.
Behind Wilmer lies a part of the Selkirks which is known only to a few ranchers in the neighbourhood, and is scarcely accessible except from this point. We had spent two days in the neighbourhood of Lake Windermere, and on the third, though each of us was booked to be hundreds of miles further on our way by the end of the week, and heaven only knew how we were even going to reach Golden again, for we had let the rig go back and the boat was reported stuck somewhere on the Columbia River, we neither of us could resist an offer that was made us of an opportunity to climb Iron Top Mountain, which was somewhere at the back of this alluring country.
The offer came from a Mr. Starboard. In Canada you will sometimes find, several hundreds of miles from civilisation, some strenuous and capable man whom you would think civilisation needed and would require. But the wilds in {225} Canada are more important. Mr. Starboard had come to these parts originally as a prospector and miner, but the mine he had come to had shut down—not for lack of silver and lead in it, but for lack of transport facilities; whereupon Mr. Starboard, fascinated by one of these valleys, had started horse-breeding there, occupying what time was left from clearing his land in making roads through the mountains and hunting big game. Dropping in at Mr. Bruce's casually one morning, he asked us if we should like to see the best view he knew of in the Selkirks. We said we should; and each, equipped with a toothbrush and a comb, was driven out to Starboard's ranch for lunch.
Travelling in the remoter parts of Canada gives you strange table companions. You never know quite what company you will meet, though you can generally count upon its being interesting. While we were being driven up the Columbia Valley a few days before, we had heard from various homesteaders that there was 'a big German bug' staying up in the mountains with his friends, trying for bear. 'They call him the Land Crab,' our informant would usually add for further elucidation of the big bug's official position. On arriving at Mr. Starboard's ranch we found that the big bug {226} in question was, in the commoner prose of Europe, the Landgraf of Hesse with two equerries and a small retinue. For a motley collection, the party that sat down to lunch that day in the chief room of Starboard's ranch would be difficult to beat. There was the Landgraf himself and his German companions, a well-known Canadian official, three valets—these all neatly dressed—Mrs. Starboard quite wonderfully frocked, as the fashion papers say, Mr. Starboard in ranching costume, and ourselves who had slept in our clothes for several days. The waiters were a Japanese and a Chinese. We fed off bear, shot by one of the Germans, who had been most successful in their hunting both of bear and goat.
Bear, by the way, was only one among other delicacies. Its taste is rather like that of Christmas beef stewed in the gravy of a goose. Vegetarians would not care about it; but after living on little else for two days I can answer for its being both appetising and sustaining, particularly in high altitudes. After lunch, four of us, Mr. Starboard, the railway man, my friend, and myself started for Iron Top Mountain, which lay seventeen miles off along a trail that rose steeply most of the way. The ponies were excellent ones, better even than {227} the slicker. Mr. Starboard had specially picked them, because he wanted to see if they could be got to carry us to the top of the mountain, a little over ten thousand feet. He had never taken ponies as high before, and doubted if the test had ever been made in Canada, though I fancy ponies have done as much or more in the Himalayas.
We did fourteen miles that afternoon, following at first the bank of a blue foaming stream, then turning eastward up a steeper valley through which a smaller stream flowed. The trail was far better than many roads in French Canada or on the prairie, and had been constructed by Mr. Starboard himself to provide access to a silver and lead mine which had been shut down for some time. It seemed extraordinary that in a country so wild and remote there should be any trail at all, but miners go anywhere. A man who has to find his way into the earth makes no difficulty about finding his way across it.
It was a day, half sunshine and half mist, and the mountains would sometimes be shut entirely in shrouds of vapour, sometimes would reveal slanted white tops cut off in mid-air by the fog below, sometimes would clear altogether, so that one could see everything on them, {228} from the snowslides down which the grizzlies travel to the narrow tracks of the goats. As we mounted, the valley grew steeper and steeper, and the trail wound more and more. We passed one place where, earlier in the year, there had been a terrific slide of snow half a mile in width. The huge firs still lay where they had fallen, shattered and splintered before it. Half-way down, the avalanche had met a great pinnacle of rock that had stood the shock unmoved, and caused the snow to part to left and to right, where it had hewn two lanes of almost equal breadth through the trees. It was just near here that Mr. Starboard showed me a grizzly's track, and told me that he had seen no less than seventeen of these bears in the last fortnight. He said that their numbers were increasing yearly in that neighbourhood. A little later a porcupine crossed the trail ahead of us, and lurched unwieldily into the undergrowth. The trees grew close together all the way, except where we passed a great stretch of mountainside where a forest fire had raged, and even there the scorched trunks still stood, gibbeted skeletons of trees.
We put up for the night in a deserted mining camp, almost a village it was, with wooden shacks likely to be used again when the Kamloops {229} to Golden Railway is completed and it is worth while getting the stuff out of the mine.
Up there it had begun to freeze hard, but a big fire and much bear, which the railway man fried over it with skill, kept us warm enough till we went to bed under many blankets in one of the shacks.
It was bitterly chill—the start in the early morning—after a breakfast of cold bear; and very soon after we set out we got into snow, and the trees ceased, and the ponies' flanks began to heave steadily. The morning was as bright as it was cold, however, and Mount Farnham, shaped like a chimney-pot, glittered right over us on the left. I remarked to Mr. Starboard what a nasty mountain it looked for climbing purposes, whereupon he astonished me by saying he had been up it.
'You went up to see if it could be done?' I said, thinking I had struck a keen climber in the European sense of the word.
'No,' said Mr. Starboard simply; 'you would not catch me going up a place like that for the climb. I went there because I thought there was silver and lead there.'
The ponies were now beginning to show their respective stamina, two of them going right ahead, and the one that carried my friend {230} getting slower and slower. We had got by this time into a sort of rocky amphitheatre where the snow lay thicker, and just as I passed under a little cascade congealed into fantastic icicles as it spouted from a cleft, I heard a noise in my rear, and turned to see my friend and his pony doing Catherine wheels in the snow together. Luckily they fell—and rolled—softly and rose uninjured; but very soon after that the ponies had to be left. We turned them loose on a platform of rock which was, Mr. Starboard said, just short of ten thousand feet up. Only a few hundred more remained to be done, which we accomplished on foot through knee-deep snow, gaining the summit just in time.
For the first time I got a view of the Rockies. We looked down a long, narrow, purple valley that ran at right angles to the Columbia River, over the first hills beyond Wilmer, into a sea of mountains. I had heard that phrase—a sea of mountains—applied to the Rockies before, but I had not realised its fitness before.
There it was, a sea of white caps frozen eternally in the very moment when they had stormed the sky.
For just five minutes we gazed, and then a mist settled down on them, and, where we were, {231} immediately a bitter wind began to blow and caused us to make for the ponies hurriedly. As we rode down the frozen trail we startled some ptarmigan, which rose and fluttered above the snow like big white butterflies.
We got back to Wilmer the following morning, and the problem then was—how to reach Golden again. The boat was due up the river some time in the day, but sandbanks do not encourage punctuality. I had my suspicions of that boat, and in any case, even if it arrived that day, it would certainly not start back again till the morning following. I did not want to wait for it at Wilmer, and decided instead that I would start walking down the valley at once and pick the boat up at Spellamacheen, forty miles downstream, some time next day. My friend was as suspicious of the walk as I was of the boat; and since he had heard that some men were likely to turn up that day in a motor from Golden who might give him a lift back in case the boat failed, he decided to wait for them.
So we parted, and rather late in the day—at {233} noon, to be exact—I set out on my walk. Forty miles is not much of a walk. It can be done in ten hours very easily—in eight if you make up your mind to it. I decided I would take nine hours over it and waste no time. I did not stop for lunch in Athelmer—where one crosses the Columbia—but merely bought some chocolate and a pound of apples, and hurried on.
About a mile out of Athelmer I ate the apples, because they were a nuisance to carry, and wished I could as easily get rid of my heavy overcoat, which had its pockets stuffed with toilet and sleeping accessories just like a suit-case. I also wished that I had on boots that I had ever tried walking in. Still I did six or seven miles in the first hour and a half, and then I realised that two things destructive to fast walking were about to happen. One was footsoreness and the other was rain. Both came upon me a few minutes later, and both increased steadily hour after hour. The valley which had looked so beautiful in all the reds of autumn, as we drove through it in the sunlight, was now filled with a clammy mist; and the road which had seemed a fine road for the horses in fine weather now struck me as offensively sticky, and my pace declined {234} to something under three miles an hour. I consoled myself for a little with the thought that I was getting an experience of autumn in the Columbia Valley. Afterwards I decided that I would gladly do without it. I could have imagined it just as well. The road was like glue and my coat had increased in weight several pounds. To balance this as far as possible, I sat on a wet spruce tree that had fallen by the side of the road and ate my packet of chocolate; after which I moved on at a very sober pace. I began to doubt if I should get to Spellamacheen that night; and the doubt soon increased to a certainty that I should not. Then I remembered that on the drive out we had passed a place called Dolans, only twenty-eight miles from Wilmer. I did some mental arithmetic which seemed to prove that even Dolans was a terrible distance off, and I tried a little running, but it was not of a kind to win a Marathon race. Running through glue when you are footsore is trying work. Nevertheless by six o'clock I calculated I was only about three miles from Dolans, which rejoiced me, until the horrid thought cropped up—if I got in after the supper hour, should I get any supper?
It was by no means certain in that valley.
Providence a few minutes later sent a buggy, driven by a small, glum-looking man up behind me, and the glum-looking man said 'Care to drive?' I said 'Yes,' and found he was bound for Dolans like myself. We got there about seven o'clock. The rancher and his wife were in; also another wayfarer like ourselves, who had arrived a few minutes before us. He was an elderly man, with a great shock of iron-grey hair, who was driving into Golden in a farm-cart from some place several days distant. He had the strangest pair in his cart—a little brown mare of about fourteen hands, and a great lanky horse the height of a giraffe.
We were all given a good meal, and ate it in silence, and sat in silence to digest it. Canadians in these valleys are often that way; it is due not to unsociability but to disuse of their tongues. Possibly to ruminate is the better way, but silence can be oppressive, and if you start a conversation and the other people only reflect upon your words, they may be weighing them as if they were gold, but you are not sure enough of this to be elated. I was rather glad to be shown to my bed, which was in a barn (but the blankets were clean, Mr. Dolans said), pretty early. {236} Mr. Dolans sat on the bed for a bit, and advised me to buy the ranch. I promised to think the matter over, and went to sleep instead in a nice atmosphere of hay, and got up for six o'clock breakfast. The other two had already driven off; but the rain had ceased, and though the road was a mud slide, I started for Spellamacheen in high hopes of catching the boat in spite of being footsore.
I need not have worried myself, for when I got there at 12.30, I learnt that the boat had just passed on its way up to Wilmer, and was not likely to be down again for two or three days.
Spellamacheen consists of a rest-house ranch in full view of a semicircle of snowclad mountains, but I was a little disheartened in spite of the view. I particularly wanted to catch the midnight train from Golden to Vancouver, and now I realised that to do this I should have to walk the rest of the way—another forty miles. From two o'clock to twelve is ten hours. If I did four miles an hour, I should catch the train to a nicety.
When I am resting on a walk I am always singularly optimistic. I was stiff after lunch—partly from the unusual exercise, partly from sleeping in wet clothes, and my feet {237} were sorer than ever, but I set out for Golden, confident that I should catch that train. A young man with a bundle on his back, who had got into Spellamacheen just ahead of me, offered to hike with me. He also was for Golden, but thought twenty miles more that day would satisfy him.
He was a pleasant and conversational young man, and told me that he was from New Brunswick, but had for the last eight months been at work digging the ditches for the Columbia Valley Irrigation Company. He had had enough of it, he said; in fact too much. Compared with New Brunswick, British Columbia was no catch at all, and he meant to go back home. Frenchmen are not fonder of their 'patrie' than are the Canadian-born. He brimmed over, did that young man, with praises of New Brunswick—brimmed over very intelligently, telling me about the Reversible Falls of St. John and the conditions of farming in the province with a clearness which few Englishmen of his class could emulate. He said that he would only get one and a half dollars a day instead of two and a half, but then one and a half would go much further there than two and a half in British Columbia. You could live better on it, and life was easier {238} there. British Columbia was too rough: he allowed there was no pioneer about him. He had got tired of the Columbia Valley months before, and had started to come out of it in July, but had only got as far as Athelmer. There he had gone to a hotel for the night, and had got drinking, and somehow before he knew it all the money he had saved during his months of digging had been drunk. So he had gone back to the ditches. But he meant to get out of the valley this time. I gathered that even this time it had been a near shave, for having again got as far as the hotel, he had found a lot of fellows drinking what he called 'Schlampagne.' He supposed there must have been a hundred bottles of schlampagne drunk last night, and whisky afterwards, but he himself had been very careful and had taken gin instead. You never knew, he said, what the whisky would be made of, but if you drank from a bottle of gin marked English, it was all right. He felt a bit funny inside to-day, but seemed quite cheerful about it because he had won away from the hotel, and was pretty sure now to get back to New Brunswick, after which he would not go pioneering again. He doubted, however, if we were likely to get to Golden that day. There was {239} a place called M'Kie's we could put up at eighteen miles on, or if we felt like it, another called Petersen's—eight miles further. I said I wanted to catch the midnight train from Golden, and was going to walk on by night: at which he said he would do the same. He repeated that he was funny inside and footsore, but he thought he could do it. We would get to M'Kie's for supper, or rather get M'Kie to make us up a supper, which we would eat upon the road, and we should thus get into Golden in good time. He was sure we were going at least four miles an hour.
I was sure we were scarcely doing three, and by the time we did get to M'Kie's, just before dark, we were both so sure that a rest would do us good that we thought we would eat our supper there after all.
M'Kie's was a shack just off the road, with a huge puma-skin nailed to the verandah. Inside was a very old woman, who said that we could get our tea all right, but M'Kie wasn't in yet, and we'd better wait for him. So we sat down in the road, and I paddled in an icy creek that went foaming by the house door. Then the old woman asked us in and chatted to us while she cooked the meal. M'Kie turning up, we fell to, and {240} M'Kie entertained us with trapping stories. It seemed he was half-trapper, half-rancher, and the big skin we had seen outside he had got only a few days before. The mountain lion had come down right into the sheepfold, and his two dogs had treed it, and a single bullet had brought it down. It was the biggest skin that he had ever seen, and measured ten feet six from tip to tail. It certainly was a large skin, but a puma's tail counts for a good deal. M'Kie had also shot a bear in the sheepfold the week before, and he talked so much about cinnamons and grizzlies, which seemed very plentiful round there, that the New Brunswicker insisted on our having his opinion as to whether they ever attacked unarmed men walking by night. M'Kie thought not. So we started on again, somewhat reassured, along what promised to be an uncommonly dark road.
The sky was all clouded over, and it was now 8.30, and there was no chance whatever of my catching the midnight train, since twenty miles still remained to be accomplished, and our limp condition made even three miles an hour hard. But we walked on, mostly because I now wanted to get the morning train at eleven o'clock, and I felt that if we {241} went back to M'Kie's and stopped the night, I should be so stiff that I could not walk at all next day. The New Brunswicker sportingly said that he would go on for as long as he could anyhow, though he wasn't bent on any particular train; and for some four mortal hours we splashed along through mud and water in what was the next thing to pitch darkness. To add to the discomfort, a high, cold, and very wet wind began to blow, and there was every prospect of rain soon descending in torrents. It was at this point, I think, that our thoughts began to turn to Petersen's. The New Brunswicker remarked that if we had passed Petersen's there was nowhere to stop at between where we were and Golden; but if we had not passed Petersen's, we might rest there a few minutes and perhaps get some milk to drink. Soon after this we felt sure that we had passed Petersen's in the dark; and though neither of us admitted it, I think our respective hearts sank. We decided to rest a little, which we did, and we rested again a few minutes later without deciding to do it. As we got up from a brief smoke on a fallen log the rain began to pelt down, and we saw a light just off the road.
I own I should have wanted to stop at {242} Petersen's anyhow, even if the New Brunswicker had not confessed that he could not go any further: but I don't know that I should have had his perseverance in knocking Petersen's up. There certainly was a light there. But I was convinced that everybody inside was deep in sleep. The New Brunswicker thought somebody might be up, and after knocking vainly for ten minutes at the front door of the house he went round to the back, while I sat on the doorstep, wondering what fifteen miles in that black rain would be like.
A couple of minutes later, the New Brunswicker appeared triumphant. The Petersens, he said, were up—in their kitchen—and thither we limped, much relieved. They were the kindest people—Swedes, both of them, and kept a milk cow, and gave us milk and buttermilk. They said they were sorry they hadn't a bed to offer us, but we could have the kitchen. Fastidious travellers might have thought the kitchen untidy and stuffy, and even the New Brunswicker before he went to sleep on the floor on his blankets, with some old clothes that we found hanging on the walls over our legs—even he got a broom (after the Petersens had gone to bed) and swept a clean space {243} for us to lie on. But at least it was warm, and a haven of luxury compared with the road.
Personally, I know that I was very sorry to have to get up off that floor at 4 A.M., when that industrious old lady, Mrs. Petersen, came in again to relight the stove and to prepare breakfast. She was followed presently by her husband and son and a hired man, while from the barn there issued forth not only that shock-headed old man with the queer rig whom I had seen at Dolans, but no less than five other men who had been working in different parts of the valley, and were hiking out before the winter should come. These had all spent their night in the barn, which seems to be a privileged resting-place for travellers in this part of the country.
Mrs. Petersen had to get breakfast for some dozen people, and an odd company we were, all unkempt and unshaven, and most of us looking, truthfully enough, as if we had slept for some months in our clothes. We all did a wash before breakfast, however. Two of the men at table were socialists, and we had a desultory conversation on that subject while we were not occupied in eating Mrs. Petersen's bacon and eggs. Nobody seemed much to dispute the socialist position, but {244} this might have been because nobody was greatly interested in it. I remember that the socialists thought that capital ought to be done away with, but Mr. Petersen, who no doubt had a small amount himself and kept a hired man, thought it was a useful thing, and should be retained. Everybody went off directly the meal was finished, except ourselves, who lingered because the New Brunswicker had boldly requested the shock-headed old man to drive us in to Golden in his farm-cart, and we went to help harness the little mare and the big giraffe.
It was still raining heavily when we started, and it rained just as heavily all the way into Golden. I never was so damped in my life, and this was due not merely to the rain, but because the farm-cart was so full of the old man's things (he seemed to be moving his house in it) that the only place available in it for me was a sack of hay. The cart had stood out all night in the rain, and the sack of hay was wet through, which made it like a sponge, so that the more I dried off the top of it the more moisture I seemed to absorb from the under part. The little mare and the big horse made about two and a half miles an hour, and if I could have walked, {245} I should have done so, for now again the eleven o'clock train seemed in danger of getting off from Golden without me. Indeed it was half-past eleven before we got to Golden, and, resigned to despair, I accompanied the New Brunswicker into an inn, where I thought I should have to wait again for the midnight train. We ordered beer in the bar, and as I was explaining to the proprietor what a nuisance it was to have missed the train, he put down his glass and said, 'Wait a minute,' and went to the telephone. He came back to inform me that the train had just been signalled, being very late. He thought I should just have time to catch it if I rushed.
I managed to get that train, and also a half bottle of rye whisky on the way to it, and sank into a seat in the smoking compartment, where I sat all soaked and miserable, supping my rye whisky at intervals and half dozing until two grizzly-bear hunters got in a few stations down the line. They were very wonderfully arrayed in moccasins and Arctic socks and turned-up overalls and sweaters and cartridge belts; and though they were modest enough in their bearing, and did not talk about their exploits until they were asked questions, the whole compartment was soon eagerly chatting of nothing but grizzly bears. The two hunters, who were amateurs of the sport, had been up in the mountains alone, a three days' portage from the railroad, and had got three grizzlies, and would have got more, they said, but that heavy falls of snow had forced them to decamp. They spoke like good shots—which does not {247} mean that they said they were good shots—and they seemed very keen on their sport, which they claimed to be the most dangerous and exacting in the world; nor would they listen to my meek suggestion that the Bengal tiger would compare favourably with the grizzly.
'It's a cat,' one of them said sniffily; 'you shoot it off elephants.'
I said that I knew Anglo-Indians who went after tigers on foot, and I also argued that even in the case of shooting from elephants the combination of a charging tiger and a restive elephant offered opportunity of showing one's nerve to be in order such as is not to be despised, especially if the howdah happens to have been inexpertly fixed and slides at the critical moment. They allowed that there might be something in this, but persisted that in any case tiger-hunting was done at ease, with natives to do all the portering, whereas grizzly-bear hunters like themselves had to carry everything with them, and camp in the snow, and shoot on mountain-sides, down which a grizzly bear would charge at a man quicker than a racehorse. They gave graphic descriptions of charges of grizzly bears, with their back legs flying ahead of their front ones. The {248} last bear they had bagged had dropped, they said, within twenty paces of them, after being rolled over three times.
I fancy they spoke reasonably enough, and that the pursuit of the grizzly—certainly if done without a guide—is as good a test of a man's nerve as any other. As to the merits of the grizzly considered as a brute likely to do for you if you do not previously do for it, and compared with such others as the tiger, the buffalo, the rhinoceros, the elephant, or the lion, there is no arriving at any final conclusion. African hunters never seem agreed about the comparative merits of the last three; while one Indian sportsman supports the buffalo, another will support the tiger. Not having any experience of the grizzly bear myself, I can only say that, judging from what I have heard, he must be accounted big enough game for anybody. There is no doubt that most of the old trappers have a wholesome respect for him, and the longer they are after him, the greater, as a rule, their respect grows. His pace, when charging, is said to be something terrific, and, downhill, it always charges as soon as hit, its back legs flying out before it at a nightmare speed. Add that it seems less easy to drop finally than any other animal, that your fingers {249} may be frozen to the trigger in the intervals of shooting, and that a single blow from one of its front paws is strong enough to claw the face out of an ox, and it will be seen that it is no contemptible foe. On the other hand, experts seem agreed that it rarely if ever charges uphill, and if shot from above is therefore comparatively harmless. If a man could always pick his position for shooting, this would reduce the value of the grizzly bear as a sporting animal; but obviously the hunter cannot always choose. Any one who has been on a snowslide will realise that. From the point of view of an unarmed person, the grizzly bear would seem to be rather less dangerous than he is sometimes made out to be. You will often hear that grizzly bears will attack a man at sight. The truth seems to be that—as is the case with any other bears—attacks are only to be feared either from female grizzlies with cubs, or from a grizzly of either sex, if the intruder is so placed as to appear to the grizzly's eyes to be cutting off its retreat to its lair. Of course no unarmed man would elect to put himself in either of these positions, and equally naturally he might unwittingly do so—in which case it would be better not to be that man, though I believe there is an {250} authentic story of a lumberman who, returning alone from his work, was suddenly attacked by two grizzlies, and managed to kill both of them with his axe, though the second mauled him badly. Authentic or not, and one grizzly or two, it is pretty certain that few people would care to try a similar encounter.
Afterwards the conversation shifted to timber-wolves and the Yukon. One of the passengers scoffed at the notion of a dog being able to kill a timber-wolf, as happens in one of Mr. Jack London's novels. A northern timber-wolf, according to this critic, is at least twice the size of the European wolf, with a disproportionately large and powerful jaw—a single snap from which would polish off any dog. Two or three of the biggest dogs known could hardly even hold a timber-wolf much less kill it. I dare say there was more in this criticism than in one I heard later, anent Mr. Maurice Hewlett. A very solemn fruit-rancher was ploughing wearily through one of Mr. Hewlett's earlier romances, and he looked up presently to say it was funny the sort of yarns these writing chaps seemed to believe in. There was a girl in the book who milked a wild deer. He had seen plenty of deer in his time, but none of them had seemed to fancy coming close enough to {251} be milked. If a chap wanted to write about the country he ought to know it right through like Mr. Service. Had we read Service's poems? Several of the men in the compartment evidently had read them; and, indeed, Mr. Service's poems concerning the Yukon seemed to have reached the heights of popularity. I think it is due in part to the fascination which the north exercises on all sorts and conditions of Canadians, not only because it stands for romance and mystery, but because a sort of idea is gaining ground that these inhospitable and well-nigh polar regions only await a sufficiently hardy type of colonist to have as great a boom almost as some of the more southern districts. The idea exists not only among business-like estate-agents, who see themselves in fancy selling Arctic blocks to this expected race, but among quite disinterested and patriotic people, who talk of it, as Mr. Service himself does, as a strong man's land. A few peculiarly strong men may survive there; and it is excusable for a poet to regard them as super-men—Canada's noblest type. As a matter of fact it is at least as romantic to weave halos about the heads of the crowd that seeks the Yukon country as it is to make one's heroine milk a wild deer. A certain praise {252} is always due to pioneers, and the struggle with nature at its cruellest and most wild is not a bad test of an individual's character; but for respectable ranchers and fruit-growers (who have never been to the Yukon themselves, but have struggled with nature quite as valiantly elsewhere) to talk enthusiastically about the great lone land as the country for breeding men is absurd. Canadians may be able to colonise further north than they have done at present, and their descendants will, no doubt, be a fine and hardy race. But there is a point in the north just as there is a point in the south beyond which no white man's country lies. If any strong men are going to perpetuate their families beyond that northern point, they are going to be strong Esquimaux—not strong Canadians. Esquimaux already do quite a lot of grappling with nature in lone lands, but they are not the heroes of Mr. Service's poems. I don't wish to labour the point, but this northern strong man business seems to me entirely overdone. There is always going to be romance attached to the uninhabitable country, and adventurous young men will get there; but the theory that these are the people of whom Canada has peculiarly to be proud will not do. Adam Gordon's bush-riders {253} had a certain merit; so had Mr. Kipling's gentlemen-rankers; so have Mr. Service's prospectors; but none of them ever forwarded civilisation very greatly. The fact is, there are true and admirable pioneers, men like Hudson and Thompson, of whom Canada has had plenty; and there are pioneers of doubtful value like those in Mr. Service's poems. These latter are picturesque enough in verse, especially in Mr. Service's verse, which catches the fascination of the north at times admirably, but the others are the men worth boasting about.
The rain persisted while we sat talking of all these matters, and the mountains were hung about with a clammy vapour which spoilt the view from the train. I should like to have stopped at Glacier, which is the usual centre for the better-known Selkirks, of which many of the giants have been climbed only within the last six or seven years, but I had not time, and they all swam by in the mist, which changed into dusk as we reached Revelstoke. There a number of lumberjacks filled up the carriage, and were very cheery and conversational all night. Having slept only two hours the night before, I should not have minded being able to get a sleeper, but they were all taken; and {254} indeed there were not even seats enough to go all round, though it was a first-class carriage. In any case the lumberjacks in my part of the carriage would have prevented sleep. Sometimes they would sit down for a few minutes and tell stories, then they would dart off to have a look at a carriage-load of Doukhobors who were on in front and seemed rather better than a show to judge by the lumbermen's guffaws when they came back from these trips. Canadian trains may not always be restful, but they are generally entertaining. The distances traversed are so great that people cannot afford to sit in them in hunched silence. They have to unbend, and some of them unbend thoroughly. That is why, though the ordinary traveller has to pass through great tracts of land in the train, he is not losing local colour to quite the extent one loses it in an European train. Some one in the carriage is sure to know something about the district one is passing through and to be ready to talk about it. The smoking compartment becomes an animated club-room in which conversation becomes general on any subject. There is no better place for a discussion of political problems, and I fancy a great many Canadians reserve their consideration of these for {255} the time they have to spend in the train. Certainly they grow very keen in the train, and I have heard the warmest arguments and the most libellous denunciations of leading Canadian statesmen hurled freely about among men who had never set eyes on one another before. And there are plenty of other arguments with which to pass the time. As we got to Sicamous Junction, for example, we took on board two fruit-growers, one of whom was a 'wet' grower and the other a 'dry.' A wet fruit-grower is a man who does not irrigate his fruit-land, and a dry fruit-grower is one who, having settled in the dry belt, has to irrigate. As fierce a debate was started between these two as ever you heard between exponents of wet and dry fly-fishing.
IN THE SELKIRKS. THE RETURN FROM THE HUNT.
As far as fruit-raising is concerned, the 'dry' men appear to have the advantage. Their contention is that they can turn off the water so as to leave their trees dry for the winter when frost at wet roots is so fatal; while they can turn the water on whenever it is wanted for swelling the fruit. In addition, the dry belt country gets a longer season of sunshine, which is more favourable for the growth of the earlier and finer dessert apples. It seems curious that none of our finest-flavoured apples, {256} such as Cox's Orange Pippin or Ribston Pippin, seem to come to perfection in Canada; and I found British Columbian fruit-growers very anxious that English people should appreciate this fact, and also get to know which are the British Columbian apples most worth asking for in England, as though some of the older orchards are still growing comparatively worthless apples, the new ones are being planted only with a few best kinds, which are as wine to water. One of these best kinds, by the way, is called Wine-sap; two of the other selectest varieties being Jonathan and Winter Banana. The latter is said to have a strong banana flavour. It is worth the English public's while, if it is going in largely for British Columbian apples, to encourage only the growing of the best, and that is to be done by demanding only the best from our own greengrocers by name. It is just as simple to plant a good apple tree as it is to plant a bad one, and there is no reason why the world in general should not eat only the best apples. So long as people are contented to look only at the colour of the fruit, which is no criterion whatever, and to pay their greengrocers' price for an unnamed sort, the best apples will not be for sale, and one will go on being provided with {257} highly-coloured samples that taste like inferior turnips.
The weather picked up in the morning, and I was able to see some of the beauties of the great Fraser River, though I somehow missed the Chinamen washing for gold, Indians spearing salmon, bright red, split salmon drying on frames, Chinese cabins and Indian villages with their beflagged graveyards, which are said to be visible from the car windows. Perhaps I was talking too much.
A diminutive Japanese who picked up my fairly heavy trunk, slung it over his shoulder and walked down the platform with it as though it were nothing but a shawl, was the first person I met in Vancouver, reminding me that that land-locked sea below was the Pacific, which white men do not own but only share with the brown and yellow Orientals. I wonder—will the day come when the latter want an ocean all to themselves? And are there, in view of this contingency, plans of this intricate coast among the Japanese naval archives? They knew the other side pretty well before the war began with Russia, and they are not a people to leave things to chance. The yellow men have known the Pacific coast from San Francisco to Vancouver as long as the white men, and put in a great deal of work there and eaten much humble pie, and also realised by the constant {259} rise in their wages—ten times anything their own country offers—that the white man is strangely lost without them. They had no flair for colonising half a century ago, when the rush was made for the Pacific coast, but they have it now.
Vancouver is very beautifully situated. The ground sloping to the shut sea, girt with those huge, straight trees that give a sense of luxuriance to this northern Pacific coast which no tropic country can excel, is a perfect situation for a big city. Vancouver is a big city. It is so big that many people are afraid for its immediate future. They say that it is already far bigger than it has any right to be, and that by the dubiously beneficent aid of innumerable real estate men, it is increasing at a pace that is bound to end in disaster. The slump had been expected in 1909, it was expected last year, it is expected this year. Some year it will come; and if I were a patriotic and hard-working inhabitant of Vancouver, I should then head a deputation which had for its purpose the dumping in the sea of a large number of the real estate agents who swarm hungrily in the place. There is a big street entirely filled with their offices, and the mark of them is {260} everywhere. Mr. A. G. Bradley, in that encyclopædic work Canada in the Twentieth Century, jeers at the English for their distrust of the real estate man, who, he thinks, serves a useful and necessary purpose. Better go to the real estate man, says Mr. Bradley, if you want to buy land, than to the bar loafer. There is a great deal in that. In individual cases they are excellent men. But, collected together in vast numbers, as in Vancouver, they can do mischief in a way the bar loafer never can, and that is by so magnifying the importance of the buying and selling of land, that people take to it in exchange for work, and falsely imagine that enormous prosperity is coming to a place which is in reality doing nothing but changing its land at fancy and speculative prices, expecting the prosperity somehow and some day to follow of itself.
I suppose Seattle, with less justification, is in very much the same case. Both, besides being ports with great expectations, happen to be the last place, so to speak, in their respective countries; and there is something magnetic in the attraction of a last place. Thither drifts that very considerable population which, by getting on geographically, almost persuades itself that it is getting on materially. Having {261} attained the limit, it stays there and does as little as it can. Such people give a city a false air of greatness, and are, in fact, a surplus population with nothing to do but bid up land against one another.
Of course there are plenty of genuine citizens in Vancouver, with all the enterprise and intelligence that help to make cities great. Practically, too, the greatness of Vancouver is in the end assured. It is already a magnificent port, having a big trade with the East, but nothing to what it will have. The Panama Canal will make it the centre, by sea, of the world. Again, it is the terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and is destined, every one says, to become the terminus of the Grand Trunk, and any other railroad that wants to outlet on the Pacific. Wheat has begun to come through it from the prairie that used to go west to Montreal. The new reciprocity treaty will divert some of this freight to the south, no doubt, but that remains to be seen. In any case, besides being a port, Vancouver will remain the business capital of a province endlessly rich in minerals and timber, and increasingly rich in fruit- and farm-land. Some day, therefore, Vancouver will extend to those remote spots {262} where already town lots are being disposed of. Some day. Only, a big city should not live upon its future; and the sale of such lots miles off in the backwoods to people who, having bought them, cannot pay for them or cannot put up houses on them, or cannot afford to live in those houses even if they put them up, because there is nothing for them to do there and their money has run out—this sort of sale, while it enriches the real estate man, does not enrich anybody else. Moreover, it creates a restless spirit among those genuine farmers out in the country who would honestly be farming their land, if real estate agents would leave them alone, and not persuade them that it is just as profitable a game to hang about waiting for opportunities to sell their farms in plots. Of course they, like most other people who get as far as Vancouver, are not mere innocents. Sellers and buyers are probably equally aware of the risks they run; but where a tide of speculation sets in, the shrewdest people seem ready to take the most absurd risks. And the slump has taken so long in coming, and the possibilities of Vancouver seem so immense, that speculation in land has become a perfect fascination.
'What will it be worth next year?'
That is the formula you constantly see at the end of an advertisement of some town lot—five miles, perhaps, from anywhere. The correct answer varies. If the slump does not come off next year, the lot may be worth double what is being asked for it now. If the slump does come off it will be worth a twentieth, perhaps, of what was given for it. Slump or no slump, this method of building up a city is unsatisfactory. Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg—these have become great as the centres of comparatively populous provinces, in which wealth has been gradually and carefully created by agricultural and industrial enterprises established on a firm basis. The jobs have been waiting for the men. In Vancouver alone, of all big Canadian cities, the men are waiting for the jobs, or, what is worse, waiting in the belief that money comes anyhow, and that jobs are not the prerequisite of money-making. I do not wish to give the impression that Vancouver is full of unemployed people, still less of unemployable ones; merely that many of the people there employed are not engaged in the undertakings that ensure the continuity of a city's prosperity.
Certainly any picture of Vancouver that made it out gloomy would be a mistake. Nothing could be livelier than its streets and its people; and if the slump does not come, and the Jeremiahs are wrong, Vancouver citizens will be justified of any amount of exultation. Already they have most of the things that make citizens pleased and proud—a beautiful site, fine streets, the most splendid of public parks, water-ways innumerable in front, and, behind, a country good to look at and rich in potentialities. Vancouver's industries, even if they do not justify the size of the place, are important and prosperous; and its propinquity to the salmon fisheries and vast timber tracts of British Columbia is something which alone would make a great town. In tone it is new world compared with Victoria, but old world compared with Seattle. There are many English people there. Living is high. No coin under five cents is, of course, in use, and when you start the day by paying that sum for a newspaper marked one cent, you find it difficult to beat down prices during the rest of the day. Apropos of newspapers, I was told of a very successful strike among the paper-boys of Vancouver some little time ago. Many people must have heard {265} of it, but it is worth retelling. The strike was headed by a youthful organiser, popularly known as Reddy, from the colour of his hair. Reddy was alleged to be thirteen years of age at the time, but Pitt was not so much older when he became Prime Minister of Great Britain. Holding the firm conviction that he and his fellow-workers were entitled to at least two cents out of the five for every paper sold (I am not sure of my figures), Reddy proclaimed a strike, and conducted it so successfully that the newspaper proprietors of Vancouver were compelled to wait upon him humbly, and yield in every particular to his demands. Among historic strikes this seems worthy of a place.
There are no lotus-lands attached to the Dominion, and will not be, unless we make over to it at some date the West Indies. But because Vancouver Island has a climate excelling that of any other part of Canada, and a beauty of scenery not surpassed anywhere; because also the men who have settled there have reckoned these possessions dearer than other things, such as the fat soil of the prairie and the chance of growing quickly rich, Canadians of the mainland are given at times to lay a charge of lotus-eating against them. I think the charge is an unfair one. Life may be less strenuous on the island, and there are men there, no doubt, who take their work there over easily. Against this has to be set the fact that the work that does go on in Vancouver Island goes on all the year round, that the colonists are men with an eye to the far future as well as to the immediate {267} one (they have, that is to say, an English ideal of permanent residence instead of the notion of getting what they can from the place and decamping), and that in their hands, if the island is not being developed as fast as it might be, it is at least safe from spoliation and waste. Some day, when the mainland Canadians have time to consider the amenities of a country life as well as the necessities, they will find themselves going to the island for hints.
As one crosses from Vancouver, the beauty of the straits prepares one a little for the beauty of the island which, so far as I saw it, has no bare or ugly places. Its coast-line has the contour of the Scandinavian fiords, but its charm is greater, owing to the luxuriant growth of the tall and splendid trees. Right to the edge of these rock-bound sea-water lakes the forest grows—Douglas firs, surely the finest of all straight-growing trees, cedar and maple, jack-pine and arbutus, and at their feet, flowers and mosses and saxifrages. Arriving at Victoria, I went straight through to Duncans, and, looking from the train, was reminded by the greenness of the land, freshened by the delicate rain that was falling, of the mountainous parts of Ceylon—which impression was strengthened by the fact of the {268} smoking-compartment being crowded with Orientals of all sorts, mostly Chinese, but Japanese too and some Indians, all seeming very much at their ease among the white men. It was a harmonious sight; but what, I wondered, would an Anglo-Indian say if he found himself condemned to sit with his cheroot among this riff-raff of natives? and what chance of any agreement on questions affecting our Indian Empire between the officials of India and these Westerners who admit the Oriental to an equality with themselves?
I was bound on a visit to friends who had a farm on Quamichan Lake, and found a buggy waiting for me at Duncans station, driven by an elderly man who had all the Canadian optimism, in spite of the fact that he had, in 1882, sold for a song the whole of Edmonton, then in his possession. Another of the missed millionaires of Canada. He brought me in the dark to my friends' farm, and when I looked out of my window next morning, I almost believed myself to be back in England. A little lake lay two fields below—a fresh-water lake still and reedy, with woods or orchards sloping to its edge, and in the distance a ring of hills. It might be Grasmere transported to some warmer county such as Devonshire; {269} but Devonshire never grew such stately trees, nor has England anywhere mountains wooded like these to their peaks. A heat-mist lay on the water, and the apples in the orchard seemed the reddest I had ever seen. Only the grass was not English grass, though it was greener than most of the grass of the new world. All round the lake were farms, belonging largely to Englishmen, dairy-farming or fruit-farming, making use of science and co-operation, but not sacrificing beauty to utility. Perhaps they could not spoil the island if they tried. The trees are so dominant and stately that every piece of cleared land seems to look at once like a part of an old English park.
It should have been called New England, this beautiful country which has so many English people in it, which carries on so much of the English tradition and sentiment, and which has even the English pheasant. I saw thousands of pheasants during the days I spent there. They were put down on the island not so very many years ago, and they have increased enormously. The deer were already there, and you may see them in the orchards, unless they are very high-fenced, at almost any time in the early morning. And there are {270} grouse and partridges in plenty too, and beasts that England no longer possesses—the coon and the puma, and the bear and the wolverine. To see the salmon leaping all across Cowichan Bay, on a bright October morning, is a sight for sore eyes, if they happen to be an angler's. To drive along the roads is to realise instantly that they are the best roads in the Dominion. Duncans is particularly English, even for Vancouver Island. I think it is vanity and a certain cause of vexation to expect in the new world a conformity to the ways of the old, which necessary differences of living—the indispensable growth of new habits, some of them better than the old—render in time impossible. Those who expect such a conformity are usually the first to forget that the old country changes too, and that it is we, as often as those across the sea, who have forgotten the ancient order and taken on the new, generally without thought, and often without reason. Though it is absurd to expect to find Canada a replica in ideas and habits of the old world, it is nevertheless pleasant to come upon a community there which, without holding itself too much apart from its neighbours or standing out against what is progressive, does represent some peculiarly {271} English qualities at their best. That is, perhaps, why the island makes a particular appeal to the man newly out from home. I certainly do not think its inhabitants are to be charged with stiffness and unadaptability. Men who have taken on the new life, and work in a spirit of optimism not less than that shown elsewhere, are rather to be admired than otherwise if they have retained, and even insist on, what is good in the old. And a love of sport and beauty and sociability, and even of leisure, is a good thing, especially when it is found among men who do their own work as these men do, and more especially when found among women who work as the women of the island do. The work is the best of all, but all work and no play turns many people—and not a few Canadians—not merely into dull folk, but into narrow-minded and backward ones, who will some day have all the unpleasantness of being rudely awakened to the fact.
No doubt there are some ne'er-do-weels on the island, but the great majority of those I met seemed to me to be capable men, likely to do well by what is the most beautiful, and will some day be, perhaps, the most valuable part of the Empire.
As everybody knows who has been in Canada, there are two hotel systems in vogue there. By the one system you pay for your room and board separately, and this is called the European plan. By the other you take your meals and lodging at a fixed price, and that is called the American plan.
In much the same way one might say there are two systems of life in Canada, and indeed elsewhere. By the one you distinguish between your work and your play, and treat each as a separate item. By the other you mix the two up, and are apt to consider yourself a strenuous person. I don't know that it is fair to describe these respectively as the American and the European system of life; but I am pretty certain that whether you apply the systems to life or to a hotel, the results produced by them are not on the whole very different. {273} Applying them to life, the main distinction seems to be that the exponents of the strenuous or American method—those who get their fun out of their work and their holidays out of their forced travel, or their compulsory rest by doctor's orders—are frequently led to confuse the appearance of work with the reality, and to be disentitled to wear that air of superiority which, in the presence of confessed believers of leisure, they too frequently assume. For, when all is said and done, leisure is as necessary to man as work, and everybody takes it, whatever he may think.
Vancouver laughs at Victoria for its dead-aliveness and want of hustle. Victoria smiles at Vancouver for its restlessness and superfluity of energy.
Now you see the point of my aphorism. I do not propose to hold the balance between these distinguished cities. Both have their peculiar merits; and if Vancouver is likely in years to come to leave Victoria far behind in the race for industrial supremacy, Victoria is none the less likely to remain ahead of Vancouver in culture and the arts. At present I should judge that Victoria is distinctly the steadier city of the two. Speculation in land is the exception rather than the rule; prices go {274} up steadily, and the land is bought by intending residents. At which point I will abandon comparisons, which are the more absurd because the destinies of the two towns are so widely different. Vancouver is a great port on the mainland of Canada, connecting it with Asia, the western States, South America, and whatever countries will henceforth export merchandise via the Panama Canal. Victoria is the political capital of British Columbia, with all the prestige that attaches to such a position and the finest climate in the Dominion. Not that it is only that. Some of its inhabitants consider that its prospects are immeasurably superior to those of Seattle, 'since the riches of Vancouver Island' (I quote from a local pamphlet), 'in their entirety incomparably more valuable than the gold-mines of Alaska, are directly tributary to the British Columbia capital.'
There is a great deal in this, though one has to remember that those riches will take many years to develop. The drawback to the immediate development of Vancouver Island is that it is covered with enormous timber. Reciprocity with the States is likely to give a fillip to the lumber industry, and the clearing of the land will then go on far quicker than {275} hitherto. True, lumbermen do not actually clear the land; they leave the stumps behind them, and all the poorer trees. But they undoubtedly open the land up. Moreover, the revival of Esquimalt as a naval base will revive the prestige of Victoria, and create more work, besides inducing railwaymen to press on into the island.
I stopped there on my way back, partly to see the town itself, partly because I wished to see Mr. Richard M'Bride. The town disappointed me just a little. It commands a magnificent view of the mountains on the mainland, and the country all round is beautiful. But the villas and gardens, which one hears so much praised, struck me as a little commonplace. Perhaps it is that I like a town to be a town and a garden to be a garden; whereas Victoria is a sort of garden city, grateful no doubt to those eyes that are accustomed to the utilitarian towns of the West, but altogether lacking in architectural fineness. The Parliament Buildings are good, and would be very good if those responsible for their maintenance would remove the inscription 'Canada' from across the front of them. In its coloured lettering it looks like the icing-sugar mottoes you see inscribed on birthday cakes.
But let a more enthusiastic pen than mine (again I fall back on that local pamphlet) describe Victoria as it appears to Victorians.
'If there are sights more beautiful than the Olympian Mountains from Beacon Hill, or the windings of the Gorge as the waters come in from the sea between waving battlements of plumy firs, then eyes have not seen them. If there is a sweeter song than the skylark's matin melodies high up from Cadboro Bay, then ears have not heard it. If there be more bewildering loveliness than clusters about the shaded and flower-gemmed gardens of Victorian homes looking seaward, then poets have not written it in imperishable numbers, nor minstrels celebrated it in well-remembered song. If there be a city of dreams, even the fabled Atlantis of antiquity, or vision of Babylonian towers set in hanging gardens, and redolent of strange odours of musk and myrrh, or fairy casements opening out to perilous seas forlorn, then never one approached in splendour this jewel of all time, ringed by the azure seas and sentinelled by everlasting hills.... A bird's song drops like the sudden peal of a bell. Outside are broad boulevards, grey with powdery macadam, stretching towards the bustling city; highways of progress and {277} modernity, now scrolled by the flight of a whizzing automobile, now echoing with the staccato sound of hurrying hoof-beats. Inside are flowers and brooding hedges, the sheen of close-cropped grasses and sun-lacquered tree-trunks—rest, peace, and sweet seclusion.'
After this it comes almost as a relief to know from the same pamphlet that 'the climate of Victoria is best expressed in figures.' There is a great deal to be said for figures.
There is a very good, small, natural-history museum in a wing attached to the Parliament Buildings, but it is absurdly small. The collection of Indian curios is remarkably inadequate, and merely tempts the visitor to ask when Canadians are going to devote some of the money they are undoubtedly making to a genuine study and collection of the remains of their predecessors in the land. Indians are not dying out as fast as some people suppose; but their crafts are, and so are their creeds and all that appertains to them. It would be easy even now to create a magnificent Indian museum, but it will become less and less easy as the years go by. Relics of Indian times are constantly being picked up by men travelling in out-of-the-way parts, or unearthed during railroad and other {278} excavations, and if it were known that the authorities would be glad to receive them and would perhaps pay the cost of their carriage to some centre, there is no doubt that many valuable finds would be forwarded to them. The making of museums, just like the building of ships, is a branch of empire work which should not be neglected; and Victorians are eminently the people to recognise this.
It was in his rooms in Parliament Buildings that Mr. M'Bride conversed with me on the subject of British Columbia. You hear people say in Canada, that if ever that astutest of party leaders, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, goes out of office with his Liberals, Mr. M'Bride will shortly after become Prime Minister of the Dominion—as Conservative leader, be it understood. He is not a great orator, and he has no scheme even for a party millennium. That, however, in Canada is a strength rather than a weakness. Politicians are not expected in Canada to bring about the millennium: indeed, so far as I could make out, the average Canadian is of opinion that when the millennium comes, it will be noticeable for an absence of politicians. They have not our reverence for these great men. But on the other hand, they require from them evidence of qualities which {279} may or may not be present in our ministers. One is a readiness to seize opportunity as it comes. Another is, to have a practical understanding of the ways of finance. Yet a third is, to be in touch with men and things—the sort of quality we mean, however vaguely, when we raise the cry of a Cabinet of Business Men. All these qualities Mr. M'Bride possesses, together with that readiness to seem agreeable which is almost a necessity to a public man.
Mr. M'Bride confined his conversation with me to British Columbia—a big enough subject for a short interview. I wished to know if the survey of the province was being carried out as quickly as possible. In a vast country like British Columbia, it seems one of the most important things. The right to acquire land must be made simple and certain. Mr. M'Bride declared that surveying was going on as fast as men and money could do it, and referred me to the surveyor-general for details. I wish I could go further into the subject, but there is no space for it here. Then we got on to education, and Mr. M'Bride asked me to assure the working men of England that the education facilities of British Columbia were as fine as any to be got anywhere. {280} Perhaps this is so, though I heard some criticism of the public schools from another eminent Victorian. It is easier, perhaps, to be enthusiastic than to be unanimous about any given system of education. To take but one small point, the co-education of boys and girls is a thing upon which people are not agreed even in British Columbia.
I was on the steamboat, ready to start for Vancouver, when the great fire of 1910 broke out in the town. With a considerable wind blowing it seemed to me not improbable that the whole of Victoria would be burnt down that night, and I had sufficient of the journalistic instinct to leave my things to go on by the boat and to go back myself to watch the blaze. Luckily the wind dropped and the fire was kept to one quarter, and I rather regretted my haste when I found myself stranded in Victoria at three o'clock in the morning. Still, it was worth while to have been there, if only to observe the working of the Canadian mind in a crisis of this sort. In England you would have heard ejaculations of horror and much sympathy expressed with those who were bound to suffer by the fire. The Victorian crowd took it quite differently. 'This'll create more work,' said one {281} man fervidly. 'Just what the town needed,' said another enthusiast. 'We'll be able to have a better-looking street there after this. Those shops weren't good enough.' I even heard some of the men who had rushed out of their burning offices talking keenly and proudly of the sort of buildings they'd have to start putting up next day—much better buildings. Presumably they were insured, but even so men in the old country would have been a little shocked and perturbed, and regretful of the old rooms they were accustomed to. I fell asleep, when I had found a hotel, almost oppressed by the optimism of Canada.
It was just before sunrise that I first saw Ottawa. I was on my way back from Vancouver, and had spent four successive days in the train, getting out only for minutes at a time to stamp about platforms where the train waited long enough to permit of such exercise.
Such days, varied only by meals for which one is always looking, but never hungry, tend to become monotonous, even though one spends them mostly in the observation car. The fact is, observation pure and simple is one of the most difficult things possible to a member of the human tribe—as hard as doing compulsory jig-saws; and reading humorous American magazines, one after the other, is an alternative that also requires the strong mind. If I must travel long distances by train, I want to be the engine-driver.
The country, I thought, looked less attractive {283} as I repassed it now than it looked before, and I put this down to the freeze-up, which had come unusually early, people kept saying, and gave to the land a black and ruffled look, like a sick bird's. Later it would be beautiful again in snow, and the life and work of the season of snow would begin. Meanwhile, people in the little northerly stations we passed had the appearance of having stopped work. You saw them standing about—always with their backs to buildings to get out of the shrivelling wind. I suppose in most of these places there is a between-time in which nobody can work.
Nothing much was doing in Ottawa when I got out there, but that of course was due to the earliness of the hour. It was so early that when I reached a hotel they told me breakfast was not to be had for some time yet, and so, since I was too wide-awake to go to sleep again, I thought I would spend the hour looking at the Dominion Parliament Buildings. Perhaps it was the too early hour, perhaps it was the coldness of the wind blowing round that bluff above the river on which the famous buildings stand—but I could feel none of that satisfaction, when I looked at them, which great architecture gives. The {284} situation is fine, but not the buildings. Anthony Trollope has written of them:—'As regards purity of art and manliness of conception, the work is entitled to the very highest praise.... I know no modern Gothic purer of its kind or less sullied with fictitious ornamentation'—but I think he must have breakfasted handsomely first. Some one else, but I forget who, and it does not matter, has described the buildings as 'a noble pile,' which seems to hit the mark, if, as I fancy, that mid-Victorian expression suggests something on so large a scale, which has obviously cost such a lot of money, that vague admiration is the least of the emotions which should be produced by a sight of it. 'A noble pile,' then, let them remain, especially since, seen from some distance, with the beautiful river below and a spacious country stretched before them, they possess a certain imposing appearance. Closer up, one is less impressed. There is a long-backed unmeaning set to the buildings, as though the architects had found concentration a vexation, and had decided to extend instead. Still, they might have elaborated painfully, and they did not—except for those little turrets on the side-buildings, surmounted by railings which one associates chiefly with {285} the London area. Area railings are meant, I suppose, to prevent errand-boys from falling into the areas, but there can be few errands to the roof of the Parliament Buildings. In passing, I did not like those hundreds of silly little windows that peep all round: one, as it were, for every official to peep from.
Reflection should serve to temper criticism, however. The year 1867, in which the Dominion Parliament required its Houses, was not one of brilliant achievement in the architectural world; and when it is remembered that Canada itself was also a new country, the wonder is that nothing worse was built. Only a few years before, we in England had been transfixed with admiration of the Crystal Palace; Royal Academicians were above criticism, and 'almost too great to live'; bright in the sun gleamed the Albert Memorial. We ruled the waves, but not the arts; and 'our daughter of the snows' took over our large ideas and our little taste in building.
Whether she took over our political ideas is another matter, upon which I pondered as I contemplated those Parliament Buildings. There stood the House in which Sir John Macdonald evolved that east-and-west policy which seemed such an empire-cementing thing; {286} where Sir Wilfrid Laurier teaches the world how to lead a party; where not as yet had been ratified that Reciprocity Agreement with America which has been agitating our statesmen so much this year, though, even as I gazed, it must have been in course of construction. Would an Imperial Parliament sit there some day, I wondered, and direct the affairs of the British Empire from what would be, not so long hence, a far more central and important spot than Westminster? I could not quite imagine it. I could not even like the idea, as some Imperialists at any price can. Home Rule for England is one of the policies I shall always stand for, I believe; even when Canadians have that grasp of Imperial affairs which we in England impute to them—by comparison, we generally mean, with our own English political opponents—that grasp which, as a matter of fact, is much less common among them at present than it is among us, whether we be Liberals or Conservatives.
I wish our party political system allowed of our minimising the zeal and intelligence of the side opposed to us without magnifying those qualities in a third party which, in strict reality, it scarcely possesses. I wish, for example, that Tariff Reformers could deride {287} the Imperialistic attitude of Free Traders (and vice versa) without declaring that Canadians could in this matter teach us all lessons. For the truth is that Canadians could not give lessons to either in this matter. They have an Imperial sentiment all right, but they do not worry over it as we do. Take that question of Preference which has been making us all so hot for several years now. It never troubled Canadians at all. They thought that there was a good deal in it from a business point of view, and they were prepared to try it—and did so. But they never for a moment fancied or perturbed themselves with thinking that, either with or without it, the Empire would totter to its fall. Our fervours left them entirely cool; and in that business-like state of coolness, after duly granting us Preference, they have, equally duly in their opinion, set out to establish reciprocity with the States. The only thing likely to make them hot in this matter is the suggestion that they have been lacking in Imperial spirit. Of course they had been lacking in that early, romantic, self-immolating and fantastically quaint, Imperial spirit which we attributed to them—just to make our own Little Englanders try and feel ashamed; but, equally again, they {288} never had it, and would not dream of claiming it even if they could be made to understand what our devotees meant by it. To forgo trade in order to uphold the flag would not appeal to a Canadian—mainly for the reason that the idea would strike him as grotesque.
In the matter of this Reciprocity Agreement, then, I think it is we who are wrong if we make it a reproach to the Canadians. It may or may not be a sound economic proceeding, but it is entered upon without prejudice to Imperial sentiment. Only if we first assume that all Canadians have been burning for years past with the same zeal for an Imperial Zollverein that has animated our own Tariff Reformers, can we now credit them with cooling off and backsliding. But such an assumption would be a very great mistake. All assumptions that Canadians view our political problems from our point of view are great mistakes. They no more do so than we view theirs from their point of view. We do not. Nothing struck me more forcibly than the fact that what causes us political turmoil in Great Britain is viewed with complete coolness in Canada, and that what Canadians are keen after remains unknown to us. While I was there, I kept seeing letters {289} in English papers (reproduced sometimes—but very briefly—in Canadian papers) saying that Canada was whole-hearted for Tariff Reform, or that Canadian Free Traders were sweeping the country; whereas the fact was and is, that these two terms (whatever might in reality be the state of Canadian parties) never conveyed in the least in Canada what we mean by them, and therefore conveyed no truth that could be understood of both peoples equally.
Does this inter-Imperial lack of comprehension threaten the future of the Empire? It might seem so at first. Lack of understanding between fellow-citizens cannot be a good thing in itself. But it has this merit, that it makes real interference on either side a rare thing. If we understood—or believed we understood—what was for the future welfare of Canada, it is doubtful if we could refrain from pointing it out, even if we could refrain from insisting upon it. If the Canadians thought themselves capable of directing us in the right way—say in the management of India—they would feel urged to give their opinion, and Anglo-Indian officials, having this last straw added to their backs, would strike en masse. As it is, we let each other's real problems {290} alone, and are satisfied with our own solutions of them. Imperial Conferences are necessary because in some matters the Empire must work together, having the same interests. Cables and Dreadnoughts are cases in point. That Great Britain still bears the main expenditure in all such matters is proof, if proof be needed, that what American papers somewhat unkindly call 'British Island Politics' are, still, more Imperial than the politics of any other part of the Empire. We pay and we ask for little in return, and the Empire will go on, even now that Canada has become a nation. Only some mistake could, I think, part us—a mistake as big as that which parted us from the United States—and we are not likely to make it; nor is Canada likely to wish for it, however great she may picture and make her own destiny. But that she will want to rule entirely in her own house is certain. Canadians themselves—the voters I mean—are not likely for a long time to wish for much more than they have in the way of national liberty. I do not think they would much worry as to whether their ambassador at Washington, for example, was appointed from Ottawa or from London. The results in either case would be likely to be very similar, {291} and in any case, as I have said, Canadians are not obsessed at present with politics. But it has to be remembered that besides Canadian voters, there are Canadian politicians, and since it is in the nature of politicians to be at least as ambitious as other people, it is natural that Canadian politicians should want in their own hands all the important posts that are to be had. Just at present Canadians take such a disrespectful view of politicians in general—which is unfair no doubt to their own political representatives, but natural perhaps in a new country which has not too much time to reflect upon the real benefactions politicians may confer, and rather fancies, from isolated examples, that 'graft' is what they are usually after—that they are not likely to demand of their own accord more power to the hand of their own statesmen. But the accord of voters depends in due course upon the persuasive powers of candidates, and I foresee the candidates persuading pretty hard in the near future: all of which will make work for Imperial Conferences of the near future, but not, it is to be hoped, impossible work.
I find that having represented myself as reflecting upon Canadian politics outside the {292} Dominion Parliament Buildings, I have altogether omitted Canadian politics in favour of Imperial considerations. Beyond showing, or rather trying to show, that Canadian politics—the things that really interest Canadians—are not in the least what we are accustomed to think them, I have got no further at all. Still, that—if I have shown it—is something, for it may suggest to some gentle reader that an Empire is not a simple, extended Great Britain, in which every one thinks precisely the same things to be of the same immediate importance; of which all the emotions and reflections may be realised in full by a perusal, let us say, of the Standard of Empire.
And so I remove myself from that bluff above the river at Ottawa to my hotel, and thence to divers parts of that charming town, which looked then—for Parliament was not sitting—something like Oxford out of term; and thence to the train carrying me back to Montreal and Quebec.
Afterwards came the return across the Atlantic to a country smaller than Canada—(less than a week of steaming, my friends), in company with Canadians who were returning to see what the old place was like after many years. I think they would not be {293} ill-pleased with it, small as it is by comparison. I hope they found behind it some of the qualities which, as it seems to me, are to be found also in THE FAIR DOMINION, making it to my eyes yet more fair.
ABBOTT, MOUNT, 215.
Alaska, 274.
Alberta, 13, 138, 141, 142, 143, 164, 165, 217.
Angell, Norman, 68.
Annunzio, Gabriel d', 178.
Anticosti, 16.
Archangel, 13.
BAIE ST. PAUL, 40.
Banff, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183.
Beacon Hill, 276.
Beaupré, Ste. Anne de, 48, 51, 53.
Bears, Grizzly, 246-50.
Belle Isle, 16.
Birmingham, 156.
Blondin, 90.
Bourassa, Mr., 30, 31, 33, 85, 86.
Bourne, Archbishop, 17.
Bradley, A. G., 31.
British Columbia, 188, 216, 237, 238, 256, 274, 279.
Bruce, Randolph, 221, 222, 225.
Brussels, 88.
CADBORO' BAY, 276.
Calgary, 141, 143, 144, 145, 163, 164, 170, 195.
Canadian Pacific Railway, 18, 141, 142, 152, 162, 182, 261.
Cartier, 40.
Ceylon, 267.
Chicago, 159.
Chuzzlewit, Martin, 128.
Colonial Intelligence for Educated Women, Committee of, 195.
Columbia River, 218, 219, 222, 224, 230, 233.
Columbia Valley, 215, 216, 225, 234, 238.
Cooper, Fenimore, 92.
Covent Garden, 117.
EDEN CITY, 129.
Edmonton, 268.
Eliott, Professor, 163.
Emerald Lake, 206.
Empress of Britain, S.S., 1.
Eucharistic Congress, the, 17, 77, 78, 79.
FARNHAM, MOUNT, 229.
Fort William, 114.
Fraser River, 257.
French River, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102.
GLACIER HOUSE, 215.
Glasgow, 73.
Golden, 215, 216, 217, 218, 224, 232, 236, 237, 238, 239, 241, 244.
Gordon, Adam, 252.
Grand Trunk Railway, 261.
Grasmere, 268.
HAMMERSMITH, 94.
Hampstead Heath, 117.
Heights of Abraham, 34.
Hennepin, Father Louis, 89.
Hesse, Landgraf of, 226.
Hewlett, Maurice, 250.
Higgsville, 128.
Home Rule, 31.
Hoogly, the, 44.
Howells, W. D., 90.
Hudson Bay Company, 115.
IMPERIALISM, 33, 36, 287, 290.
Illecillewaet Glacier, the Great, 215.
Iron Top Mountain, 224.
Irrigation Company, Columbia Valley, 237.
Irrigation Works, Columbia Valley, 221.
Keats, John, 200.
Kinchinjunga, 177.
Kipling, Rudyard, 105, 106, 253.
LACHINE RAPIDS, 77.
Laggan, 200.
Laurentian Mountains, 27.
Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 278, 286.
Liverpool, 1.
LONDON CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, 152.
London, 73, 86, 117, 118, 119, 285.
Louise, Lake, 198, 199, 200, 206.
Lourdes, 47.
MACDONALD, SIR JOHN, 285.
Manchester, 156.
Marseilles, 77.
M'Bride, Richard, 275, 278, 279.
Meredith, George, 130.
Montmorency Falls, 38, 39, 49, 50.
Montreal, 17, 34, 45, 56, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 84, 292.
Murray Bay, 40.
Muskoka Lakes, 92.
NAPOLEON, 120.
New Brunswick, 32, 237, 238, 242.
North Pole, 136.
Nottingham, 28.
Nova Scotia, 32.
Olympian Mountains, 276.
Ontario, 8, 13, 32, 33, 45, 85, 109, 111, 112, 113, 141, 151.
Orléans, Ile d', 40.
Parnell, Charles Stewart, 31.
Pitt, William, 265.
Police, North-West Mounted, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136.
Port Arthur, 114.
QUAMICHAN LAKE, 268.
Quebec, 18, 20, 22, 26, 28, 31, 32, 34, 37, 38, 39, 45, 49, 50, 53, 56, 60, 61, 64, 111, 112, 292.
REVELSTOKE, 253.
'Reddy,' 265.
Regina, 82, 126, 131, 132, 136, 156, 218.
Remittance Men, 161.
Rockefeller, 23.
Rockies, the, 170, 171, 177, 181, 198, 209, 215, 216, 230.
Roosevelt, Theodore, 45.
Russia, 135.
SAGUENAY, 37, 39, 41, 43, 44, 46.
San Francisco, 258.
St. Irénée, 40.
St. John, Reversible Falls of, 237.
St. Lawrence, 16, 26, 34, 39, 40, 44, 57.
St. Malo, 41.
Saskatchewan, 144.
Selkirk, Lord, 123.
Selkirks, the, 215, 216, 224, 225, 253.
Sir Donald, Mount, 215.
Spain, 156.
Superior, Lake, 114.
Thames, 94.
Toronto, 29, 65, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 91, 92, 93.
Town Planning Bill, 140.
Trachoma, 3.
Trollope, Anthony, 284.
ULSTER, 33.
VALLEY OF THE TEN PEAKS, 201, 202, 204.
Vancouver, 196, 236, 258, 259, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 267, 273, 274, 282.
Vancouver Island, 266-71, 274.
Vannutelli, Cardinal, 78.
Victoria, 196, 267, 273, 275, 277, 280.
Webb, Captain, 90.
Wilmer, 216, 220, 221, 224, 232, 236.
Winnipeg, 8, 84, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 123, 124, 127, 128, 130, 144.
Wood, Major, 34.
World's Fair, the, 82, 83, 87, 88.
YOHO VALLEY, 206, 207, 209, 210.
Young Women's Christian Association, 196.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press
