Westward with the Prince of Wales Part 2

There was the usual heavy program, an official lunch, the review of war veterans, a visit to the streets when the lavish electric light had been switched into the beautiful illuminations, when the two cruisers were mirrored in the harbour waters in an outline of electric lights, and when on the ring of hill-tops red beacons were flaring in his honour. There was a dance, with his lucky partners sure of photographic fame in the local papers of tomorrow, and then in the morning, medal giving, a peep at the annual regatta, famous in local history, on lovely Quidividi Lake among the hills, and then, all too soon for Newfoundland, his departure to New Brunswick.

There was no doubt at all as to the impression he made. The visit that might have been formal was in actuality an affair of spontaneous affection. There was a friendliness and warmth in the welcome that quite defies description. His own unaffected pleasure in the greeting; his eagerness to meet everybody, not the few, but the ordinary, everyday people as much as the notabilities, his lack of affectation, and his obvious enjoyment of all that was happening, placed the Prince and the people, welcoming him, immediately on a footing of intimacy.

His tour had begun in the air of triumph which we were to find everywhere in his pa.s.sage across the Continent.

CHAPTER II

ST. JOHN, NEW BRUNSWICK

I

When one talks to a citizen of St. John, New Brunswick, one has an impression that his city is burnt down every half century or so in order that he and his neighbours might build it up very much better.

This is no doubt an inaccurate impression, but when I had listened to various brisk people telling me about the fires--the devastating one of 1877, and the minor ones of a variety of dates--and the improvements St. John has been able to accomplish after them; and when I had seen the city itself, I must confess I had a sneaking feeling that Providence had deliberately managed these things so that a lively, vigorous and up-to-date folk should have every opportunity of reconstructing their city according to the modernity of their minds and status.

The vigorousness of St. John is so definite that it got into our bones though our visit was but one of hours. St. John, for us, represented an extraordinary hustle. We arrived on the morning of Friday, August 15, after the one night when the sea had not been altogether our friend; when the going had been "awfully kinky" (as the seasick one of our party put it), and the spiral motif in the _Dauntless'_ wardroom had been disturbing at meals.

CHAPTER III

ON THE TRAIN BETWEEN ST. JOHN AND HALIFAX

I

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 Sat.u.r.day. Then we raised the little blinds that hung between our modesty and a world of pa.s.sing platforms, and found that we were in a junction (probably Truro), with a very Sat.u.r.day 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 embarra.s.sment.

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 s.e.xes, 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 circ.u.mstances, 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, b.u.t.tons up the green curtains, and then in a s.p.a.ce 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, _does_ one 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 pa.s.senger 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 pa.s.senger, 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 pa.s.senger 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.

II

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 gla.s.s. 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 pa.s.senger trains. One does not face a _table d'hote_ meal 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 Gaspe 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 b.u.t.ter. 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.

CHAPTER IV

HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA

I

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. The _Dragon_ and _Dauntless_, 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 ma.s.sive 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.