St. John, New Brunswick, is many things. It is the historic spot where that splendid figure in Canada's story, the great Champlain, and De Monts, came in the dim days of the West's beginning, to rear a new city in a new wild continent, and called it after the saint on whose day they first made their landing.
It is commerce if that is the way you look at things; an ice-free port, tingling with every modern activity, where lumber and grain and fruit and all the riches of Canada are swung to Europe and the West Indies, and scores of ports about the world, and where, when winter grips the immense St. Lawrence, passengers can slip, free of the ice, to the ocean tracts.
It is the gate of pleasure. The entry port where the sportsman and the holiday maker from America or Europe can start for the fine fishing streams, where salmon and trout are kings; for the spruce forests, where moose and caribou, deer and even bear can be shot, and where wild duck and the Canadian partridge—which is really grouse—are commonplace; or to the many fine holiday towns of the maritime provinces, where golf and good scenery go hand in hand.
It is romance. Here was one of the wrestling-points where France fought Britain for the supremacy of the Americas; where, even, France fought France, as one adventurer strove to wrest the riches of the fur trade from another. Somewhere on one of the ridgy shoulders of its grey-rock peninsula the wife of De Monts, in his absence, held the fort against Charnisay, only to have her garrison massacred before her eyes, when on promise of honourable terms, she opened her gates. Somewhere on another gruff shoulder of the rock was the fort that Charnisay built from the ruins of the first, and where De Monts ultimately came into his own again by marrying his conqueror's widow.
At the wharves of St. John to-day lie the ships that are heirs to the Boston clippers, links in a past of tragedy and trade, when New England men did business or battle across the waters of Fundy Bay, first as Englishmen with the French and then as independent Americans with the English.
It was these English, the United Loyalists, who came out of America in 1783, during the War of Independence, or who were forced to come out later, who really founded St. John as it stands to-day. And it was the Loyalists with their courage, tenacity, and virility who, with the sturdy French settlers of the old regime, built up the fortune and the spirit of St. John as it exists now.
It is a city of quality. It has a vivid air of attractiveness and prosperity. It is history and romance rounded off with the grain elevator.
St. John, on August 15, was perfectly aware of the office it had to fulfil. It was on its quays that the Prince was first to set foot on Canadian soil, and St. John had made up its mind that that occasion should be handled in a befitting manner.
True, it did not manage its weather quite so neatly as St. John's, Newfoundland, but on the other hand it refused to allow the rain to interfere with its plans or with its warmth of welcome.
The entrance of the two light cruisers from the drenched, brown-grey Bay of Fundy, past the rather militaristic looking Partridge Island, was the signal for immediate attention.
The inevitable motor launches came out by scores, and with them high-backed tugs; launches and tugs were covered with flags and people bearing flags, both flags and people being damp but enthusiastic.
The long harbour itself gives a sense of pit-like depth. Not only are the black quay walls extremely high, to accommodate a tide that has a drop of twenty-five feet, but on the quays themselves are piled immense grain elevators, with "Welcome" written in giant letters on their towering sides, coal-loading sheds with their lattice derrick arms that always seem to have been constructed by Mr. Wells's Martians, and great freight buildings.
Round this huge, black amphitheatre of welcome, on whose sea-floor was theDragonand ourselves, people collected thickly, and everywhere there was the glint of flags through the rain.
But even the crowds about the harbour did not give a hint of the vast throng waiting on the landing-stage. Hidden away from the water by sheds, this very cheery crush filled the wide, free space of the harbour approach. Their numbers and eagerness had already proved the mutability of the police force, and volunteers in khaki were enrolled by the score in order to keep them back.
Almost as imposing as the throng were the photographers; not a few photographers, but a battalion of them, running about with that feverish energy Press-photographers alone possess, and climbing on to walls and roofs as though impelled by some divine, inner instinct towards positions from which the Prince of Wales could be shown to the world at unique and astounding angles.
Movie men and "stills" men, the former the real workers of the world, for they carry their heavy machines with all the energy of Lewis gunners, nipped about, formed in groups ready to shoot notabilities, mixed themselves up in the guard of honour until chased away by sergeants, and in the end forming up in a solid phalanx that almost obliterated Canada, to snap His Royal Highness as he came up the covered way from the wharf.
He had been received on the wharf by the Governor-General of Canada, the Duke of Devonshire, a heavy figure, whose very top hat seemed to have an air of brooding meditation in keeping with his personality; the Premier of Canada, Sir Robert Borden, an individuality of almost active reticence, a man who somehow seemed to get all the mass and weight of Canada into a mere "How d'y' do?" And with these were many of the leaders, political, commercial and social, of the Dominion, come together to join in Canada's first greeting.
It was raining, but there was no dampening that magnificent welcome. The meeting with Dominion leaders down by the waterside had been formal. The meeting between the Prince and the mass of people in the big, open space was the real welcome. Here, as in every other town in the Dominion, the formal side of the visit was entirely swamped by the human. The people themselves made this welcome splendid and overwhelming, elevating it to that plane of intimacy and affection that made the tour different from anything that had been conceived before.
After facing this superb welcome, which obviously moved him a great deal, the Prince passed to another side of the square, to where St. John had added a touch of youth, prettiness and novelty to the loyalty of her greeting.
In a big stand there were massed several thousand school children, all of them in white, all of them carrying small flags, all of them thoroughly wet, and all of them enthusiastic beyond discipline.
They had carried the first outburst of cheering well beyond the capacity of mere adult lungs and endurance, and as they cheered without break, they waved their flags, so that the whole stand seemed a big fire, over which a multitude of tiny red, white and blue flames unceasingly played. This mass flag-wagging is a great feature of Western welcomes, and a most effective one. It enables the hands to join in an enthusiasm which the Canadian does not seem to be sufficiently able to express by his cheering and whistling. Really ardent Canadians put a rattle into their empty left hands, and express their joy of welcome with the maximum of noise as well as activity.
Only on the approach of His Royal Highness did these delightful children staunch their cheering, and that merely because they wanted their lungs to sing.
They transferred their enthusiasm into their songs. Their sharp, high singing, with a touch of the nasal in it, and a Canadian accenting of "r's," introduced us to the splendid and inevitable hymns—beginning with "O Canada" and ending with "God Bless the Prince of Wales"—that we were to hear across the breadth of the Dominion and back again.
On the stage below this great flower-box of infants was a number of girls; each of them, it seemed, a princess of her race, having the wonderful poise, the fine skin, and the bright comeliness that make Canadian women so individual in their beauty.
These girls wore bright, symbolical dresses, and each carried a shield bearing the arms and the name of the province of the Dominion of Canada she represented. It was a pageant of greeting in which, advancing in pairs, all the provinces the Prince was to visit in the next few months came forward to bid him welcome at the moment he set foot in the Dominion.
Curtsying to the Prince, the girls fell back and formed a most attractive tableau. It was a delightful picture, delightfully carried out, and there was no doubt about the Prince's pleasure.
While His Royal Highness witnessed this spectacle and listened to the singing of the kiddies, the crowd, vanquishing police and boy scouts and khaki, flooded over the open space and gathered about him. It was a scene we were to see repeated almost daily during the trip.
Without police protection, and, what is more, without needing it, the Prince stood in the centre of a homely crowd, rubbing shoulders with it, becoming an almost indistinguishable part of it, save for the fact that its various members found it an opportunity to shake hands with him.
It was a state of things a trifle strange to Britons. It would probably have seemed little less than anarchy to a chief of British police, yet one was immensely impressed by it. It had all the intimacy of a gathering of friends. And the Prince was as natural a part of that genial and informal crowd as any Canadian.
The crowd shared his amusement at the strenuous work of the camera men, who wormed their way through the masses of people with their terrible earnestness, dogged his steps whenever he ventured to move a yard, and who seemed to feel that the reason he stopped to make speeches was that they should be able to get a steady, three-quarter face snap of him at a distance of two feet.
When the Prince slyly hinted to a photographer that, really, the most important and newsy part of the function was the massed battalion of camera men, and that actually they were the people who should be photographed and not him, the crowd shared the joke with him.
Prince and people were all part of one democracy, the real democracy that never thinks about democracy, but simply acts humanly and naturally in human and natural affairs.
"He'll do," said one man. "Why—he's just a Canadian after all."
The city had made itself attractive for the coming of the Prince. In the fine and broad King Street up which he drove to fulfil the many functions of the day, the handsome commercial buildings were bright with flags and hung with the spruce branches that individualize Canadian decorations. Turreted arches of spruce, and banners of welcome strung right across the street, entered into the scheme.
King Street is a brave avenue sweeping up hill from the very edge of the harbour water. Here the Market Slip, the old landing-place of the Loyalists, thrusts into the very heart of the city and brings the shipping to the front doors of the houses. In the big triangular space about it gather the carters with their "slovens," curious square carts, hung so low that their floor boards are but a few inches from the ground.
In King Street one can see the life and novelty of the town. In it are the hotels, in the vast windows of which people, involved in the ritual of chewing gum, sit as though on a verandah, and contemplate the passing world—it is a solemn moment, that first encounter through plate glass, of a row of Buddhas, with gently-moving jaws. Although most Canadian cities boast big hotels of modern type, the old type, with the big windows, are everywhere, to lend a peculiar individuality to the streets.
In King Street are the smart shops, showing jewellery, furs, millinery and the rest, of a design and quality equal to anything in London and New York. The Canadians have a particular passion for silver of good design, and the display in the shops is a thing that impresses.
Here, too, are the Boot-Shine Parlours, the Candy Stores, the temples of the Barbers, and those wondrous purveyors of universal trivia, the Drug Stores.
In America, boot (only it is called a shoe) shining is a special rite, and it is performed outside the home in a "Parlour." These Parlours are often elaborate affairs, attached to a tobacconist, or to the vendor of American magazines, who is also a tobacconist; but quite frequently they exist alone on their own profits. In these Parlours, and in an armchair on a raised throne, one sits while an expert with brushes, polish, rags and secret varnishes, performs miracles on one's shoes. It is an art that justifies itself, but the fact that so many Canadian roads off the main streets are mere strips of dusty unmetalled nature explains the necessity of so many shops devoted to this business; that, and the dearth and independence of servants.
The Candy Stores are bright and elaborate places also. There are so many of them, and their wares are so ingenious and varied, that one almost fancies that eating candy is one of the national industries. All candy stores have an ice cream soda section, where cream ices of an amazing virtuosity and number, and called, for some reason I have not discovered, "Sundaes," can be had.
The Drug Stores have an ice cream section, always; small and pretty ante-rooms, with a chintz air and chintz chairs, where these delightful ices, compounded of cream and all kinds of fruits or syrups, and dubbed with romantic names, such as "Angel's Sigh," and "Over the Top," are absorbed by citizens with a regularity that seems to point to a definite racial impulse.
One expects to find an ice cream counter in a drug store, because one comes to realize that there is little within the range of human possibility that the drug store does not sell. It sells soap and toothpaste and drugs, as one would expect; it sells magazines and fountain-pens and ink, cameras and clocks. It sells sweets and walking-sticks and postage stamps and stationery. It sells everything. It even sells whiskey. It is, indeed, the only place in the Continent of the Dry where spirits of any sort can be obtained, not freely, of course, but through the full ceremonial of the law, and by means of a doctor's certificate.
And then the Barbers' Temples. When I talk of barbers' shops as temples, I speak with the feeling of awe these austere and airy places of whiteness and marble, glass and mosaic, silver and electricity impressed me. There seems to be something measured and profound in the way the Canadian goes to these conventicles, in the frequency of his going, and in the solemnity of the act that he undergoes when there.
There are so many of these shops, and they are always so crowded that it seems to me the Canadian makes his attendance on the barber, not an accident, but a solemn habit; an occasion with not a little ritual in it. And the barber has the same air.
When a Canadian puts the top of himself into the hands of the barber, he gets, not a hair-cutting, but a process. He is placed in a chair of leather and electro-plate, standing well out to the middle of a pure white floor. As a chair it is the kindlier brother of the one the dentist uses; it has all the tips, tilts and abrupt upheavals, but none of the other's exactions.
It is tipped and tilted and swung hither and thither by a white-vested priest as he goes austerely step by step through a definite service of the head. It is an intricate formulary that includes the close cropping of the temples, shaving behind the ears, shaving the back of the neck (unless you show you belong to a feebler stock, and protest), swathing the head in hot towels, oil shampooing, massaging, "violet raying" and an entire orchestration of other methods of making the hair worthy.
And the barber is not a mere human being with clippers. He is a hierophant with a touch of dogmatic infallibility. He does not suggest, "Would you like a scalping massage, sir? I recommend it..." and so on; he tells you out of the calm cloud of his reticence: "I'm going to give you a Marshwort Electrolysis, and after that Yellow Cross Douch for that nasty nap in your hair."
It takes a strong-willed fellow to say "No" to that attack of assertion, especially as you feel that you are shattering the entire tradition of Canada, where the whole elaborate process is just an ordinary hair-cut.
The barber does not stop at the head, either. At the slightest weakness on your part, he beckons from one of his—well—side chapels, a brisk and imperturbable manicurist. There are manicurists in all barbers' shops. Like the barbers, they are artists in their cult, and while he works on the head the manicurist accomplishes miracles of perfection on the nails, with scented baths, hot swathings, unguents, steel weapons and orange sticks.
And while these things are occurring to you, you can have a Shoe Shine pundit from another corner, and I daresay you can have a chiropodist at the same time, so that for twenty minutes there is going on about your body a feverish concentration of activity that makes even Henry Ford's assembling department look spiritless.
King Street sweeps broadly uphill to King Square, which is a large and pleasant garden, merging imperceptibly into the old graveyard, the grey old headstones of which add serenity to the charm of the park.
The Square itself seems to be the Harley Street of St. John, for among the big buildings, and the "apartment" blocks, which are really flats, I came upon the plates of many doctors, who, in the unexpected American manner, add their special qualifications under their name, so that I read:
The streets of St. John lead out at right-angles from this central group of square and street, for this is the West, where the parallel road-making of efficient town-planning reigns. Some of these streets are carved out of the grim, grey, slaty rock, that even now crops out in the midst of the stone and brick and wood of human effort, to show upon what stubborn stuff the first founders had to build.
In the residential streets, and particularly in the suburbs, the homes are planned charmingly. The houses are of brick or wood, most of them built in the Colonial style, and all pleasantly gabled, and of a bright and attractive colour, while every one has the deep and comely porch, upon which are scattered rocking and easy chairs, and even settees.
The houses are surrounded by the greenest lawns, and these lawns are not marred by walls or fences, but run right down to the curb, with but a strip of sidewalk for pedestrians. This elimination of railings is a thing that might well be imitated in our country; it gives the residential districts a pretty and park-like air that is altogether delightful.
We passed through miles of such homes in a journey round the deep bay of the harbour to the place where theDauntless, dwarfed by the high lock walls, lay alongside the quay. There is a steam ferry connecting the two peninsulas that landlock the harbour, but our automobile driver, no doubt, had the civic spirit and wanted to show us both the beauties of suburban St. John, the great cantilever bridge across the St. John river and the famous Reversible Falls.
The Reversible Falls are at the mouth of the St. John river, where it pushes through the high limestone cliffs into the harbour. At low tide there is the authentic fall, as the river cascades over the rock in a drop of fifteen feet, but the extraordinarily tide of the Bay of Fundy, rising ten feet above the river level, actually reverses things, and forces back the flood along the channel with some turbulence.
Our journey to theDauntlesswas for the melancholy business of collecting our luggage. It was here we left the cheery comfort of the ward room for the definite adventure by railway across the Continent. Our miraculously erected cabins, the one amidships, and the two that sat snugly in the aeroplane hangar beneath the bridge, and kept company with the song of the siren on foggy nights, were needed to accommodate the Canadians who were to accompany the Prince by sea to Halifax, then on to Prince Edward Island, and finally up the St. Lawrence to Quebec.
It was a reluctant farewell to a ship we had found so companionable and keen. But there was a ray of comfort when the baggage master at the Canadian Railway "Dee-po" handed us a little bundle of luggage checks for the mixed assortment of trunks and bags we had dumped into his room.
It had been an endless pile of luggage, and we apologized for it, and continued to say, "There's another piece, or two, or more, outside on the sloven...."
But the length of that luggage queue did not dismay the baggage master. He counted the big pieces calmly, fixed a little tag on each piece, tore off half of each tag and presented it to us.
"Through to Halifax," he said dispassionately.
"We'll be along this evening, when the special comes in, to look after it——"
"Look after it in the baggage-room atHalifax," he said, without excitement.
"It'll be all right?" we asked, in our English way.
"It's checked through to Halifax," he insisted evenly, as though that explained everything, which, of course, it did.
"And our suit-cases over there? We want them on the train."
"They'll be on the train," he told us, with his splendid calm. "Your car porter will take them on the train."
"We'll want them for tonight, so we don't want anything to go astray, you know."
"They'll be under the seats of your section, waiting for you tonight. The porter will see to that."
It was only then that we realized that we had been taken under control by Canadian Railways, and that the business of Canadian Railways is to make that control thorough, and to eliminate all worries, of which baggage is the worst, for their passengers from the outset to the end of the journey.
Our baggage being checked through to Halifax, awaited our arrival serenely at Halifax. If it had been checked through to Vancouver or Japan, it would have awaited our arrival with equal certainty. Our suit-cases were under our seats when we arrived at the car.
Canadian railways do not let passengers down on little everyday details like that.
Next morning in the train we were awakened to an unexpected Sunday. It was not an ordinary calm Sunday, but a Sunday with a hustle on, a Canadian Sunday. There was no doubt about the bells, though they were ringing with remarkable earnestness in their efforts to get Canadians into church.
Lying in our sleeping sections, we were bewildered by the bells, and by the fact that by human calendar the day should be Saturday. Then we raised the little blinds that hung between our modesty and a world of passing platforms, and found that we were in a junction (probably Truro), with a very Saturday air, and that the church bells were on engines.
It takes some time for the Briton to become accustomed to the strangeness of bells on engines, and the fact, that, instead of whistling, the engines also give a very lifelike imitation of a liner's siren. The bells are tolled when entering a station, or approaching a level crossing, and so on, and the siren note is, I think, a real improvement on the ear-splitting whistle that harrows us in England.
Our first night on the Canadian National had been a prophecy of the many comfortable nights we were to spend on Canadian railways. We had been given an ordinary sleeping car of the long-distance service, but as we had it to our masculine selves, the exercise of getting out of our clothes and into bed, and out of our bed and into clothes, was an ordinary human accomplishment, and not an athletic problem tinged with embarrassment.
The Canadian sleeper is a roomy and attractive Pullman, with wide and comfortable back to back seats, each internal pair called a section. At night the seats are pulled together, and the padding at their backs pulled down, so that a most efficient bed is formed. A section of the roof lets down, resolving itself into an upper bunk, while long green curtains from roof to floor, and wood panels at foot and head complete the privacy.
In these sleepers Canadians make the week's journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There is no separation of sexes, and a woman may find that she is sharing a section with a strange male quite as a matter of course, the only distinction being that the chivalrous Canadian always gives up the bottom berth, if it is his, to the lady, and climbs to the top himself.
In these circumstances, to remove one's clothes, and particularly that part that proclaims one's gender, is a problem. I have tried it. One switches on the little electric reading light, climbs into the bunk, buttons up the green curtains, and then in a space a trifle larger than a coffin endeavours to remove, and place tidily, one's clothes (for articles scattered on that narrow bunk during the struggle mean that one ends by becoming simply a tangle of garments).
At these moments one realizes that hands, arms, legs, and head have been given one to complicate things. One jams them against everything. And there are times, too, when the unpractised Briton is simply baffled.
They tell in every Canadian train the tale of the Englishman who came face to face with such a crisis. Having removed most of his garments, he came to that point where the ingenuity of human nature seemed to fail. He pondered it. The matter seemed insuperable. And he began to wonder if.... He put his head through his curtains and shouted along the crowded—and mixed—green corridor of the car:
"I say, porter,doesone take off one's trousers in this train?"
Most of the railways, the Canadian Pacific certainly, are putting on compartment cars; that is, a car made up of roomy private sections, holding two berths. On most sleepers, too, there is a drawing-room compartment that gives the same privacy. These are both comfortable and convenient, for, apart from privacy, the passenger does not have to take his place in the queue waiting to wash at one of the three basins provided in the little section at the end of the car that is also the smoking-room.
It must not be thought that the sleepers are anything but comfortable; they are so comfortable as to make travelling in them ideal. The passenger, also, has the run of the train, and can go to the observation car, where he can spend his time in an easy chair, looking through the broad windows at the scenery, or reading one of the many magazines or papers the train provides; or he can write his letters on train paper at a desk; can go out to the broad railed platform at the rear of the car, and sit and smoke, and see Canada unrolling behind him.
And at the appropriate times for breakfast, dinner and supper—that is the Canadian routine, and there is no tea—the passenger goes to the diner and has a meal from a menu that would make the manager of many a London hotel feel anxious for his reputation.
We had some experience of the lavishness and variety of Canadian meals in St. John, when we had ordered what would have been an ordinary dinner in London, and had had to cry "Kamerad!" after the fish.
The first Canadian breakfast we had on the Canadian National was of the same order. It began, inevitably, with ice-water. Ice-water is the thing that waiters fill up intervals with. Instead of pausing between courses for the usual waiter's meditation, they make instinctively for the silver ice-water jug, and fill every defenceless glass. Ice-water is universal. It is taken before, during and after every meal, and there are ice-water tanks (and paper cups) on every railway carriage and every hotel. At first one loathes it, and it seems to create an unnatural thirst, but the habit for it is soon attained.
The menu for breakfast is always varied and long—and I speak not merely of the special trains we travelled in, for it was the same on ordinary passenger trains. One does not face atable d'hôtemeal outside of which there is no alternative but starvation, but one is given the choice of a range of dishes for any of the three meals that equals the choice offered by the best hotels in London.
Breakfast begins with fruit; breakfast is not breakfast in the American continent unless it begins with fruit. And at that precise time breakfast fruit was blueberries. Other fruit was on the menu: raspberries, melon, grape-fruit, canteloupe, orange-slices, orange juice, and so on; but to avoid blueberries was to be suspected of being eccentric, and even an alien enemy.
Blueberries were in season. Blueberries and cream were being eaten at breakfast with something more than mere satisfaction by the entire Canadian nation. Blueberries were being consumed with a sort of patriotic fervour, for blueberries have a significance to the Canadian. It is a fruit peculiarly his own; he treats it as a sort of emblem, he waxes enthusiastic over it, and the stranger feels that if he does not eat it (with cream, or cooked as "Deep Blueberry Pie"), he has not justified his journey to the Dominion. Hint that it is merely the English bilberry or blaeberry, or whortleberry and—but no one dares hint that. The blueberry is in season. One eats it with cream, and it is worth eating.
You may follow with what the Canadian calls "oats," but which you call porridge, or, being wiser since the dinner at St. John, you go straight on to halibut steak, or Gaspé salmon, or trout, or Jack Frost sausages, or just bacon and eggs. There is a range that would have pleased you in an hotel, but which fills you with wonder on a train.
And not merely the range, but the prodigality of the portions, surprises. Your halibut or salmon or trout is not a strip that seems like a sample, it is a solid slice of exquisitely cooked fish that looks dangerously near a full pound, and all the portions are on the same scale, so that you soon come to recognize that, unless you ration yourself severely, you cannot possibly hope to survive against this Dominion of Food.
When we sat down to that breakfast in the Canadian National diner I think we realized more emphatically than we had through the whole course of our reading how prodigal and rich a land Canada was. As we sat at our meal we could watch from the windows the unfolding of the streams and the innumerable lovely lakes, that expand suddenly out of the spruce forests that clad the rocky hills and the sharp valleys of Nova Scotia.
We could see the homestead clearings, the rich land already under service and the cattle thereon. It was from those numberless pebbly rivers and lakes that this abundance in fish came; in the forests was game, caribou and moose and winged game. From the cleared land came the wheat and the other growing things that crowd the Canadian table, and the herds represented the meat, and the unstinted supply of cream and milk and butter. Even the half-cleared land, where tree stumps and bushes still held sway, there was the blueberry, growing with the joyous luxuriance of a useful weed.
To glance out of the window was to realize more than this, it was to realize that in spite of all this luxuriance the land was yet barely scratched. The homesteads are even now but isolated outposts in the undisciplined wilderness, and when we realized that this was but a section, and a small section at that, of a Dominion stretching thousands of miles between us and the Pacific, and how many thousand miles on the line North to South we could not compute, we began to get a glimmer of the immensity and potentiality of the land we had just entered.
There is nothing like a concrete demonstration to convince the mind, and I recognize it was that heroic breakfast undertaken while I contemplated the heroic land from whence it had come that brought home to me with a sense almost of shock an appreciation of Canada's greatness.
By the time I had arrived at Halifax, and had a Canadian National Railway lunch (for we remained on the train for the whole of our stay in the city) I knew I was to face immensities.
The first citizen of Halifax to recognize the Prince of Wales was a little boy: and it was worth a cool twenty cents to him.
The official entry of His Royal Highness into Halifax was fixed for Monday, August 18th. TheDragonandDauntless, however, arrived on Sunday, and the Prince saw in the free day an opportunity for getting in a few hours' walking.
He landed quietly, and with his camera spent some time walking through and snapping the interesting spots in the city. He climbed the hill to where the massive and slightly melodramatic citadel that his own ancestor, the Duke of Kent, had built on the hill dominates the city, and continued from there his walk through the tree-fringed streets.
At the very toe of the long peninsula upon which Halifax is built he walked through Point Pleasant, a park of great, and untrammelled, natural beauty, thicketed with trees through which he could catch many vivid and beautiful glimpses of the intensely blue harbour water beneath the slope.
It was in this park that the young punter pulled off his coup.
He was one of a number of kiddies occupied in the national sport of Halifax—bathing. He and his friends spotted the Prince and his party before that party saw them. Being a person of acumen the wise kid immediately "placed" His Royal Highness, and saw the opportunity for financial operations.
"Betcher ten cents that's the Prince of Wales," he said, accommodating the whole group, whereupon the inevitable sceptic retorted:
"Naw, that ain't no Prince. Anyhow he doesn't come till tomorrow, see."
"Is the Prince, I tell you," insisted the plunger. "And see here, betcher another ten cents I goes and asks him."
The second as well as the first bet was taken. And both were won.
This is not the only story connected with the Sunday stroll of the Prince. Another, and perhaps a romantic version of the same one, was that it was the Prince who made and lost the bet. He was said to have come upon not boys but girls bathing. Seeing one of them poised skirted and stockinged, for all the world as though she were the authentic bathing girl on the cover of an American magazine, ready to dive, he bet her a cool twenty that she dare not take her plunge from the highest board.
This story may be true or it may be, well, Canadian. I mean by that it may be one of the jolly stories that Canadians from the very beginning began to weave about the personality of His Royal Highness. It is, indeed, an indication of his popularity that he became the centre of a host of yarns, true or apocryphal, that followed him and accumulated until they became almost a saga by the time the tour was finished.
In this short stroll the Prince saw much of a town that is certainly worth seeing.
Halifax on the first impact has a drab air that comes as a shock to those who sail through the sharp, green hills of the Narrows and see the hilly peninsula on which the town is built hanging graciously over the sparkling blue waters of one of the finest and greatest harbours in the world.
From the water the multi-coloured massing of the houses is broken up and softened by the vividness of the parks and the green billowing of the trees that line most of the streets. Landing, the newcomer is at once steeped in the depressing air of a seaport town that has not troubled to keep its houses in the brightest condition. As many of those houses are of wood, the youthful sparkle of which vanishes in the maturity of ill-kept paintwork, the first impression of Halifax is actually more melancholy than it deserves to be.
The long drive through Water Street from the docks, moreover, merely lands one into a business centre where the effect of many good buildings is spoilt by the narrowness of the streets. Such a condition of things is no doubt unavoidable in a town that is both commercial and old, but those who only see this side of Halifax had better appreciate the fact that the city is Canadian and new also, and that there are residential districts that are as comely and as up-to-date as anywhere in the Western Continent.
Halifax certainly blends history and business in a way to make it the most English of towns. It is like nothing so much as a seaport in the North of England plus a Canadian accent.
There is the same packed mass movement of a lively polyglot people through the streets. There is the same keen appetite for living that sends people out of doors to walk in contact with their fellows under the light of the many-globed electric standards that line the sidewalk.
There is the same air of bright prosperity in the glowing and vivacious light of the fine and tasteful shops. They are good shops, and their windows are displayed with an artistry that one finds is characteristic throughout Canada. They offer the latest and smartest ideas in blouses and gowns, jewellery and boots and cameras—I should like to find out what percentage of the population of the American Continent does not use a camera—and men's shirtings, shirtings that one views with awe, shirtings of silk with emotional stripes and futuristic designs, and collars to match the shirts, the sort of shirts that Solomon in all his glory seems to have designed for festival days.
At night, certainly, the streets of Halifax are bright and vivid, and the people in them good-humoured, laughing and sturdy, with that contempt of affectation that is characteristic of the English north.
The bustle and vividness as well as the greyness of Halifax lets one into the open secret that it is a great industrial port of Canada, and an all-the-year-round port at that, yet it is the greyness and narrowness of the streets that tells you that Halifax is also history. In the old buildings, and their straggled frontage, is written the fact that the city grew up before modernity set its mark on Canada in the spacious and broad planning of townships.
It was, for years, the garrison of Britain in the Americas. Since the day when Cornwallis landed in 1749 with his group of settlers to secure the key harbour on the Eastern seaboard of America until the Canadians themselves took over its garrisoning, it was the military and naval base of our forces. And in that capacity it has formed part of the stage setting for every phase of the Western historical drama.
It was the rendezvous of Wolfe before Quebec; it played a part in the American War of Independence; it was a refuge for the United Empire Loyalists; British ships used it as a base in the war of 1812; from its anchorage the bold and crafty blockade runners slipped south in the American Civil War, and its citizens grew fat through those adventurous voyages. It has been the host of generations of great seamen from Cook, who navigated Wolfe's fleet up the St. Lawrence, to Nelson. It housed the survivors of theTitanic, and was the refuge of theMauretaniawhen the beginning of the Great War found her on the high seas. It has had German submarines lying off the Narrows, so close that it saw torpedoed crews return to its quays only an hour or so after their ships had sailed.
The Prince of Wales was himself a link in Halifax's history. Not merely had his great-great grandfather, the Duke of Kent, commanded at the Citadel, but when he landed he stepped over the inscribed stone commemorating the landing on that spot of his grandfather on July 30th, 1860, and his father in 1901.
His Royal Highness made his official landing in the Naval Dockyard on the morning of Monday, August 18th. As he landed he was saluted by the guns of three nations, for two French war sloops and the fine Italian battleshipCavour, which had come to Halifax to be present during his visit, joined in when the guns on shore and on the British warship saluted.
At the landing stage the reception was a quiet one, only notabilities and guards of honour occupying the Navy Yard, but this quietness was only the prelude to a day of sheer hustle.
The crowd thickened steadily until he arrived in the heart of the city, when it resolved itself into a jam of people that the narrow streets failed to accommodate. This crowd, as in most towns of Canada, believed in a "close up" view. Even when there is plenty of space the onlookers move up to the centre of the street, allowing a passageway of very little more than the breadth of a motor-car. Policemen of broad and indulgent mind are present to keep the crowd in order, and when policemen give out, war veterans in khaki or "civvies" and boy scouts string the line, but all—policemen, veterans and scouts—so mixing with the crowd that they become an indistinguishable part of it, so that it is all crowd, cheery and friendly and most intimate in its greeting. That was the air of the Halifax crowd.
It always seemed to me that after the roaring greeting of the streets the formal civic addresses of welcome were acts of supererogation. Yet there is no doubt as to the dignity and colour of these functions.
From the packed street the Prince passed into the great chamber of the Provincial Parliament Building, where there seemed an air of soft, red twilight compounded from the colour of the walls and the old pictures, as well as from the robes and uniforms of the dignitaries and the gowns of the many ladies.
As ceremonies these welcomes were always short, though there was always a number of presentations made, and the Prince was soon in the open again. In the open there were war veterans to inspect, for in whatever town he entered, large or small or remote, there was always a good showing of Canadians who had served and won honours in Europe.
Everywhere, in great cities or in a hamlet that was no more than a scattering of homesteads round a prairie's siding, His Royal Highness showed a particular keenness to meet these soldiers. They were his own comrades in arms, as he always called them, and when he said that he meant it, for he never willingly missed an opportunity of getting among them and resuming the comradeship he had learned to value at the Front.
In most towns, as in Halifax, his round of visits always included the hospitals. His car took him through the bright sunshine of the Halifax streets to these big and very efficient buildings, where he went through the wards, chatting here and there to a cot or a convalescent patient, and not forgetting the natty Canadian nurses or the doctors, or even, as in one of the hospitals on this day, a patient lying in a tent in the grounds outside the radius of the visit.
In Halifax, also, there was another grim fact of the war which called for special attention; that was the area devastated by the terrible explosion of a ship in the docks in December, 1917.
The party left the main streets to climb over the shoulder of the peninsula to where the ruined area stood. It is to the north of the town, on the side of the hill that curves largely to the very water's edge. Down off the docks, and an immense distance away it seems from the slope of ruin, a steamer loaded with high explosive collided with another, caught fire and blew up, and on the entire bosom of that slope can be seen what that gigantic detonation accomplished.
The force of the explosion swept up the hill and the wooden houses went down like things of card. In the trail of the explosion followed fire. As the plank houses collapsed the fires within them ignited their frail fabric and the entire hillside became a mass of flames.
The Prince looked upon a hill set with scars in rows, the rock foundations of houses that had been. Houses had, in the main, disappeared, though here and there there was a crazy structure hanging together by nails only. Across the arm of the harbour, on the pretty, wooded Dartmouth side, he could see among the trees the sprawled ugliness of the ruin the explosion had spread even there.
On this bleak slope, where the grass was growing raggedly over the ruins, the old inhabitants were showing little inclination to return. Only a few neat houses were in course of erection where, before, there had been thousands. It was as though the hillside had become evil, and men feared it.
Over the hill, and by roads which are best described as corrugated (outside the main town roads of Canada, faith, hope and strong springs are the best companions on a motor ride), he went to where a new district is being built to house the victims of the disaster.
Modern Canada is having its way in this new area, and broad streets, grass lawns and pretty houses of wood, brick or concrete with characteristic porches give these new homes the atmosphere of the garden city.
Perched as it is high on the hill, with the sparkling water of the harbour close by, one can easily argue that good has come out of the evil. But as one mutters the platitude the Canadian who drives the car points to the long, tramless hill that connects the place with the heart of the city, and tells you curtly:
"That's called Hungry Hill."
"Why Hungry Hill?"
"It's so long that a man dies of hunger before he can get home from his office."