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 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, _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 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.
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 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 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 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.