Lower Town, Quebec—from the TerraceLower Town, Quebec—from the Terrace
Here among them are the ruins of an old theater—its solid-stone façade still holding high above the narrow run of pavement. It has been swept within by fire—the evil enemy that has fallen upon Quebec again and again and far more devastatingly than even the cannon that have bombarded her from unfriendly hands.
"Are they going to rebuild?" you may inquire, as you look at the stolid shell of the old theater.
"Bless you, no," exclaims your guide. "The Music Hall was burned more than a dozen years ago. Quebec does not rebuild."
But he is wrong. Quebec does rebuild, does progress. Quebec progresses very slowly, but also very surely. To a man who returns after twenty years' absence from her quiet streets, the changes are most apparent. There are fewercalechesupon the street—those quaint two-wheeled vehicles which merge the joys of a Coney island whirly-coaster and the benefits of Swedish massage—although the drivers of these distinctive carriages still supply the American's keen demand for "local color" by shouting "marche donc" to their stout and ugly little horses as they go running up and down the steep side-hill streets. Nowadays most tourists eschew thecalecheand turn towards trolley cars. That of itself tells of the almost sinful modernization of Quebec. It is almost a quarter of a century since the electric cars invaded the narrow streets of the Upper Town, and in so doing caused the wanton demolition of the last of the older gates—Porte St. Jean. The destruction of St. Jean's gate was a mistake—to put the matter slightly. It came at a time when the question was being gently raised of the replacement of the older gates that had gone long before—Palace, Hope and Prescott. Nowadays but two of these portals remain, the St. Louis and the Kent gates, and these are not in architectural harmony with the solid British fortifications.
Indeed, that is one of the great crimes to be charged against the modernization of Quebec. Other old towns in America have brought their architects to a clever sense of the necessity of making their newer buildings fit in absolute harmony with the older. They have clung jealously to their architectural personality. Quebec hasmissed that point. With the exception of the lovely Chateau which fits the traditions of the town, as a solitaire fits a ring setting, the newer buildings represent a strange hodge-podge of ideas.
Quebec herself rather endures being quaint than enjoys it; for in this day of Canadian development she has dreamed of the future after the fashion of those insistent towns further to the west. It has not been pleasant for her to drop from second place in Canadian commercial importance to fourth or fifth. She has had to sit back and see such cities as Winnipeg, for instance, come from an Indian trading-place to a metropolitan center two or three times her size, while her own wharves rot. It is a matter of keen humiliation to the town every time a big ocean liner goes sailing up the river to Montreal—her river, if you are to give ear to the protests of her citizens whom you meet along the Terrace of a late afternoon—without halting at her wharves, perhaps without even a respectful salute to the town which has been known these many years as the Gibraltar of America.
So she has given herself to the development of transcontinental railroad projects. When one Canadian railroad decided to use her as the summer terminal of its largest trans-Atlantic liners without sending those great vessels further up to Montreal, Quebec saw quickly what that meant to her in prestige and importance. When the railroads told her, as politely as they might, that they could not develop her as a mighty traffic center because of the broad arm of the St. Lawrence which blocked rail access from the South, she put her wits together and set out to bridge that arm with the greatest cantilever in the world. The fall of the Quebec bridge five years ago with its toll of eighty lives, was a great blow to the commercial hopes of the town. But they have begun to arise once more. The wreckage of thattragedy is already out of the way and the workmen are trying again, placing fresh foundations for the slender, far-reaching span that is going to mean so very much to the portal city of Canada.
*****
But progress has not robbed Quebec of her charm. It seems quite unlikely that such a brutal tragedy shall ever come. They may come as they did a year or two ago and tear down the impressive Champlain market—one of the very great lions of the Lower Town—but they do not understand thehabitansfrom those back country villages around Quebec. Progress does not come to those obscure communities—no, not even slowly. The women still gather together at some mountain stream on wash-days and cleanse their laundry by placing it over flat rocks by the waterside and pounding it with wooden paddles, there are more barns roofed with thatch than with shingles, to say nothing of farms where a horse is an unknown luxury and men till the soil much as the soil was tilled in the days of Christ. From those places came thehabitansto Champlain market—within my memory some of them in two-wheeled carts drawn by great Newfoundland dogs—and it was a gay place on at least two mornings of the week. One might buy if one pleased—bartering is a fine art to the French-Canadian and one dear to his soul—or one might pass to the next stall. But one could never pass very many stalls, with their bright offerings of food-stuffs or simple wearing apparels alike set in garniture of the brilliant flowers of this land of the short warm summer.
And now that the sturdy Champlain market is no more—literally torn apart, one stone from another—a few of these folk—typical of a North American race that refuses to become assimilated even after whole centuries of patient effort—still gather in the open squarethat used to face the market-house. They do not understand. There are only a few of them, and their little shows of wares are still individually brave, still individually gay. But even these must see that the folk with money no longer come to them. Perhaps they see and with stolid French-Canadian indifference refuse to accept the fact. Such a thing would be but characteristic of a folk, who, betrayed and forgotten by their home-land for a little more than one hundred and fifty years, still cling not merely to their religion, but to traditions and a language that is alien to the land that shelters them. In Montreal the traveler from the States first finds French all but universal, the hardy Tricolor of France flying from more poles than boast British Union Jacks. In Quebec that feeling is intensified. We hunted through the shops of the town for a British standard, and in vain. But every one of the obliging shop-keepers was quick to offer us the flag of France. And the decorativemotifof the modern architecture of new Quebec lends itself with astonishing frequency to the use of the lilies of old France.
"It is that very sort of thing that makes Britain the really great nation that she is," an old gentleman told us one afternoon on the Terrace. We had been discussing this with him, and he had told us how the city records of Quebec—a British seaport town—were kept in French, how even the legislative proceedings in the great new parliament building out on the Grande Allee beyond the city wall were in that same prettily flavored tongue. "Yes, sir," he continued, "we may have a King that is English in title and German in blood, sir, but here in Canada we have one who through success and through defeat is more than King—Sir Wilfred Laurier—our late premier, sir."
We liked the old gentleman's spunk. He was typical of the old French blood as it pulses within the newFrance. We liked the old gentleman, too. To us he was as one who had just stepped from one of Honoré Balzac's stories, with his mustaches, waxed and dyed into a drooping perfection, his low-set soft hat, his vast envelope of a faded greatcoat, his cane thrust under his arm, as Otis Skinner might have done it. We had first met him one morning coming out of the arched gateway of the very ancient whitewashed pile of the Seminary; again as he stepped from his morning devotions out through the doorway of the Basilica into the sunlight of what was once the market-square of the Upper Town—after that many more times. Finally we had risked a little smile of recognition, to be answered by the salute courtly. We had conquered. We knew that romance personified was close to him. Perhaps our old gentleman was an army man; he must have been able to sit on the long porch of the Garrison Club, that delectable and afternoon-teable place that looks out upon the trim grass-carpeted court-yard, and tell stories at least as far back as the Crimea.
"A Frenchman?" you begin, as if attacking the very substance of our argument of romance, "fighting the battles of the English Queen?"
Bless your heart, yes. The Frenchmen of lower Canada have never hesitated at helping England fight her battles. Within sixteen years after their own disastrous defeat before the walls of the citadel city that they loved so dearly, they were fighting alongside of their conquerors to hold her safe from the attacks of the tremendously brave, and half-fed little American army which ventured north through the fearful rigors of a Canadian winter, hopelessly to essay the impossible.
But our old gentleman was not a soldier. He was a seller of cheeses in St. Roch ward, who had retired in the sunset of his life. He knew the Quebec of the days when the Parliament house stood perched at the ramparts at the Prescott gate, and the old gateways themselves were narrowimpassesat which the traffic of great carts and littlecalechesin summer, and dancing, splendid sleighs in winter, was forever fearfully congested; he could tell many of the romances that still linger up this street and down that, within the stout walls of this house or in the sheltered garden of some nunnery or half-hidden home. He could speak English well, which, for a Frenchman in Quebec, is a mark of uncommon education. But, best of all, he knew his Quebec. He was in a true sense the old Quebec living in the new.
Even among the cosmopolitan folk of the Terrace in the shady late afternoons, you could recognize him as such. He was apart from the throng—a motley of bare-footed, brown-cloaked friars, full-skirted priests, white nuns and gray and black, red-coated soldiers from the Citadel to give a sharp note of color to the great promenade of Quebec, millionaires real and would-be from New York, tourists of every sort from all the rest of our land, funny looking English folk from the yellow-funnelledEmpress, which had just pulled in from Liverpool and even now lay resting almost under the walls of old Quebec—he was readily distinguished. To be with him was, of itself, a matter of distinction.
Four Brethren upon the TerraceFour Brethren upon the Terrace
To walk the staid streets of the fascinating old town with him was a privilege. Always the excursion led to new and unexpected turns; one day up the narrow lane and through the impressive gates of the Citadel, where a petty officer detained our American cameras and assigned us to a mumbling rear private for perfunctory escort around the old place. It is no longer tenanted by British troops. The last of these left forty years ago. These red-coats are counterfeit; raw-boned boys from Canadian farms being put through their military paces by a distant government which may sometimes overlook, but not always. The Citadel as a military work istremendously out-of-date. Even as it now stands, it is almost a century old, and that tells the story. The guns that have so wide a sweep and so exquisite a view from the ramparts may look fear-inspiring, but the ramparts are of stone and would be quickly vulnerable to modern naval ordnance.
The gun that is unfailingly shown to Americans is a small field-piece which is said to have been captured from us at Bunker Hill. Whereupon our tourists, with a rare gift of repartee, always exclaim:
"Ah, you may have the gun, but we have the hill!"
And the military training of the young Canadian militiaman is so perfect that he smiles politely in response. As a matter of fact, there is no record of the fact that the gun was ever taken from the Americans, although each little while there is a request from the States for its return, which is always met with derision and scorn by the Canadians. Politics in Our Lady of the Snows is almost entirely beyond the understanding of an American.
*****
Sometimes our friend of old Quebec led us to the churches of the town—many of them capped with roosters upon their steeples, instead of the Roman cross which we had believed inevitable with the Catholic church. Since then we have been informed that many of the Swiss churches of the same faith have that high-perched cock upon the steeple-tops. We paused once at a new church on the rim of the town, where the very old habit of having a nun in constant adoration of the Host is perpetuated, paused again at the ever fascinating Notre Dame des Victoiries in Lower Town, with its battlemented altar and its patriotic legends in French, which a British government has been indulgent enough to overlook, stood again and again at the wonderful Van Dyke which hangs in the clear, cool, white and goldBasilica. From the churches, we sometimes went to the chapels; the modern structure of the Seminary, or the fascinating holy places of the Ursulines, where the kind-hearted Mother Superior turned our attention from the imprisoned nuns chanting their prayers behind an altar screen, like the decorous and constant hum of honey-bees, to the skull of Montcalm. Then we must see his burial place in the very spot in the chapel wall cleft open by a rampant British shell sent to harass his army.
"Montcalm," said our gentleman of the old Quebec. "He was, sir, the bravest soldier and the finest that France ever sent overseas."
And we could only remember that other fine monument of Quebec, out on the Grande Allee toward the point where Abraham Martius's cows, chewing their cuds on an open plain, awoke one day to find one of the world's great battles being fought—almost over their very heads. In that creation of marble and of bronze, the great figure of Fame is perched aloft, reaching down to place her laurel branch upon a real French gentleman—Montcalm—at the very hour of his death. That memorial is something more. In a fashion somewhat unusual to monuments, it fairly vitalizes reality.
*****
There must be a real reason why Quebec is such a Mecca for honeymoon journeys. You can see the grooms and the brides out on the Terrace, summernight after summernight. Romance hovers over that high-hung place. It sometimes saunters there of a sunshiny morning—a couple here, or a couple there in seemingly loving irresponsibility as to the fact that ours is a workaday world, after all. It lingers at the afternoon tea, along the Terrace promenade. It comes into its own, night after night, when the boys and girls of the town promenade back and forth to the rhythmical crash of amilitary band, or in the intervals stand at the rail looking down at the rough pattern of street-lights in Lower Town, the glistening string of electrics at Levis, or listening to the rattle of ship's winches which give a hint that, after all, there is a world beyond Quebec.
When night comes upon the Terrace, one may see it at its very best. He may watch the day die over the Laurentians, the western sky fill with pink afterglow, and the very edge of those ancient peaks sharpen as if outlined with an engraver's steel. For a moment, as the summer day hesitates there on the threshold of twilight and good-by, he may trace the country road that runs its course along the north bank of the St. Lawrence by the tiny homes of thehabitansthat line it, he may raise his eyes again to the sharp blue profile of the mountains. He may hear, as we heard, the old gentleman from St. Roch, whisper as he raises his pointing cane:
"I come here every night and look upon the amphitheater of the gods."
So it is the night that is the most subtle thing about Quebec. It is night when one may hear the bells of all the churches that have been a-jangle since early morning ring out for vespers before the many altars, the sharp report of the evening gun speaking out from the ramparts of the Citadel. After that, silence—the silence of waiting. There is a surcease of the chiming bells—the Terrace becomes deserted of the army of pleasure-seekers who a little time before were making meaningless rotation upon it, the bandmen fall asleep in their cell-like casements of the Citadel, the lights of Lower Town and of Levis go snuffing out one by one. Silence—the silence of waiting. Only the sentinels who pace the ramparts of the crumbling fortifications, the occasional policeman in the narrow street, the white-robedsister who sits in perpetual adoration of the Sacrament, proclaim Quebec awake. Quebec does not sleep. She lives, like an aged belle in memory of her triumphs of the past, keeps patiently the vigil of the lonely years, and awaits the coming of Christ.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:Punctuation and spelling standardized.Frequent inconsistent hyphenation not changed.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
Punctuation and spelling standardized.
Frequent inconsistent hyphenation not changed.