The Personality of American Cities Part 26

22

THE CITY THAT NEVER GROWS YOUNG

He stands, hat in hand, facing the city that honors his memory so greatly. To Samuel de la Champlain Quebec has not merely given the glory of what seems to us to be one of the handsomest monuments in America, but here and there in her quiet streets she brings back to the stranger within her walls recollections of the doughty Frenchman who braved an unknown sea to find a site for the city, which for more than three hundred years has stood as guardian to the north portal of America.

Other adventurous sea spirits of those early days went chiefly in the quest of gold. Champlain had loftier ambitions within his heart. He hoped to be a nation-builder. And not only Quebec, but the great young-old nation that stands behind her, is his real monument.

Still, the artist's creation of bronze and of marble is effective--not alone, as we have already said, because of its own real beauty--but also very largely because of its tremendously impressive setting at the rim of the upper town--facing the tiny open square that as far back as two hundred and fifty years ago was the center of its fas.h.i.+onable life.

Champlain in bronze looks at the tidy Place d'Armes--older residents of Quebec still delight in calling it the Ring--with its neat pathways of red brick and its low, splas.h.i.+ng fountain, as if he longed to return to flesh and blood and walk through the little square and from it down some of the narrow streets that he may, himself, have planned in the days of old.

Or perhaps he would have chosen that once imposing main thoroughfare of Upper Town, St. Louis street, which out beyond the city wall has the even more distinctive French t.i.tle of the Grande Allee. We have chosen that main street many times ourselves, leading straight past the castellated gateways of the Chateau, fas.h.i.+oned less than a score of years ago by a master American architect--Mr. Bruce Price--and since grown very much larger, quite like a lovely girl still in her teens. On the other side of the street, close to the curb of the Place d'Armes, is the ever-waiting row of Victorias and _caleches_, whose drivers rise smilingly in their places even at the mere suggestion of a coming fare.

Beyond these patient Jehus stands the rather ordinary looking Court House, somewhat out of harmony with the architectural traditions of the town--and then we are plunged into the heart of as fascinating a street as one may hope to see in North America. It is clean--immaculate, if you please, after the fas.h.i.+on of all these _habitans_ of lower Canada--and it is bordered ever and ever so tightly by a double row of clean-faced stone houses, their single doors letting directly upon the sidewalk, and, also after the fas.h.i.+on of all Quebec, surmounted by steep pitched tin roofs and wonderfully fat chimneys, covered with tin in their turn.

Quebec seems to have a pa.s.sion for tin. It is her almost universal roofing, and in the bright suns.h.i.+ne, glittering with mirror-like brilliancy of contrast against the age-darkened stone walls, it has a charm that is quite its own.

One of these old houses of St. Louis street sets well back from the sidewalk in a seeming riotous waste of front lawn, and bears upon its face a tablet denoting it as the one-time home of the Duke of Kent. This distinguished gentleman lived in Quebec many years before he became father of Queen Victoria. In fact, Quebec remembers him as a rather gay young blade of a fellow who had innumerable mild affairs with the fascinating French-Canadian girls of the town. These things have almost become traditions among the older folk of the place. Those girls of Quebec town seem always to have held keen attractions for young blades from afar. When you turn down Mountain Hill and pa.s.s the General Post Office with its quaint Golden Dog set in the _facade_, they will not only make you re-read that fascinating romance of the old Quebec, but they will tell you that years after the Philiberts and the Repentignys were gone and the English were in full enjoyment of their rare American prize, that same old inn, upon whose front the gnawing dog was so securely set, was run by one Sergeant Miles Prentice, whose pretty niece, Miss Simpson, so captivated Captain Horatio Nelson of His Majesty's s.h.i.+p _Albemarle_ that it became necessary for his friends to spirit away the future hero of Trafalgar to prevent him from marrying her.

Beyond the old house of the Duke of Kent, St. Louis street is a narrow path lined by severe little Canadian homes all the way to the city gate.

Many of these houses are fairly steeped in tradition. One tiny fellow within which the ancient profession of the barber still works is the house wherein Montcalm died. And to another, Benedict Arnold was taken in that ill-starred American attack upon Quebec. A third was a gift two centuries ago by the Intendant Bigot to the favored woman of his acquaintance. Romance does creep up and down the little steps of these little houses. They change hardly at all with the changing of the years.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Lower Town, Quebec--from the Terrace]

Here among them are the ruins of an old theater--its solid-stone facade 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 sh.e.l.l 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 fewer _caleches_ upon the street--those quaint two-wheeled vehicles which merge the joys of a Coney island whirly-coaster and the benefits of Swedish ma.s.sage--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 the _caleche_ and 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 has missed 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 that tragedy 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 the _habitans_ from 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 s.h.i.+ngles, 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 the _habitans_ to 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 pa.s.s to the next stall. But one could never pa.s.s 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 st.u.r.dy 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 a.s.similated even after whole centuries of patient effort--still gather in the open square that 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 decorative _motif_ of the modern architecture of new Quebec lends itself with astonis.h.i.+ng 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 t.i.tle 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 s.p.u.n.k. He was typical of the old French blood as it pulses within the new France. We liked the old gentleman, too. To us he was as one who had just stepped from one of Honore 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 gra.s.s-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 narrow _impa.s.ses_ at which the traffic of great carts and little _caleches_ in 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-funnelled _Empress_, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Four 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 a.s.signed 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 is tremendously 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 c.o.c.k 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 d.y.k.e which hangs in the clear, cool, white and gold Basilica. 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 sh.e.l.l sent to hara.s.s 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 suns.h.i.+ny 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 a military 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 s.h.i.+p'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 the _habitans_ that 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 G.o.ds."

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 cas.e.m.e.nts 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-robed sister 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