VICTORIAS AND FURS
It was eleven o’clock the next morning before the girls were finally
rounded up for breakfast or lunch, as they might choose to call it.
For this they went to an attractive place not far from the hotel
where June again found ripe strawberries, big and luscious.
“You’ll turn into a strawberry, June,” said Hilary, but June only
pointed to the dishes of the same natural product on all the other
trays in the cafeteria procession, as she replied, “I don’t eat so
many more than the rest of you,—I just say more about it.”
“By the way, Miss West,” continued Hilary, “we’re going in
victorias, aren’t we?”
“How many vote for victorias?” asked Patricia, “hands up.” Every
hand at the little table went up, and as the girls at the table
close by had heard the question, theirs as well were lifted.
“It is already arranged. Several of you had spoken of it—victorias
it is. Now for shopping. I will go with Marjorie, Jean and Rhoda,
for they seem to have the most to do. The rest of you meet us at the
hotel in not less than an hour. There is a drug store right here on
the corner, a department store half block in that direction. Keep in
mind this corner and the way to the hotel. Hilary, you are in
charge.”
Hilary pretended to be much honored and the rest of the girls began
to joke her by asking if they might do the most obviously proper
things. But they had little shopping to do and arranged to meet at
the entrance of the big store.
“Listen,” said Cathalina, as they were returning to the hotel. “That
boy has a French paper. I’m going to get one. I had no idea that
Montreal was so French, though I heard some French spoken on the
boat, of course.”
“I heard a lady say that Montreal is fifty per cent French, and that
of that fifty per cent ninety per cent can not speak English.”
“No wonder, then, Betty, that they have both French and English on
the shop signs. I should like to spend a summer up here some time.
No need of going abroad to keep up your French!” Later, Cathalina
discovered that McGill University has many such summer pupils.
Duly at two-thirty, three victorias, drivers high in the air, rolled
away from the hotel to see the Canadian city of Montreal.
“O, I feel so English,” sighed Marjorie.
“Me, too,” said Rhoda, “but I think they ought to be called ‘Queen
Marys’ now instead of victorias!”
“Did you notice, Rhoda,” drawled Helen, “what our elderly waiter
said to you last night?”
“About my ‘’am sandwich’? Wasn’t I good not even to smile?”
“You were indeed, and so were the rest of us, I think, though Lil
gave me one look that almost upset me. She kept as sober as an owl,
of course. I didn’t want to make fun of any one, but I never heard
the h’s dropped, outside of a book or a movie.”
“Did you ever _hear_ it in either?”
“Well, you know what I mean!”
“Gently, girls, the driver might hear you,” warned Miss Patty, who
made the fourth passenger in this vehicle.
The first place at which the driver stopped was in front of Notre
Dame Cathedral. The girls ran up the broad stone steps which led to
the entrance. Silently they entered, viewed the brilliant interior,
the altars and shrines with their candles, walked quietly down the
aisle to the right past a kneeling worshipper who was telling her
beads before a shrine, and into a part of the building to the rear
of the altar.
“I can translate that,” whispered Marjorie to Cathalina as they
looked at the inscriptions upon the wall. “‘Silence in the holy
place’.” (Silence dans le lieu saint.)
“Notice the Latin inscriptions, too,—‘Oculos ad nos converte’—”
Hilary lingered a little to drop a coin into a box and came out with
her eyes full of tears. “I’ve been brought up in another kind of
service,” she explained to June, “but this touches me some way.”
“It’s the Lord’s house,” replied June solemnly.
“And some people’s faith and hope.”
“Des Jardins,” read Cathalina on the windows of a store where the
victorias were stopping. “I did not catch what the man said and I
was in the last victoria,” she explained later to one of the party,
“so imagine my surprise, after having translated it ‘gardens’ and
expecting to find flowers, to see this wonderful fur store.”
A great display of furs it was. The girls all longed to buy some at
the summer prices, but had not planned for any large expenditures on
this trip.
“Mother usually buys her furs up north,” said Betty, “since Auntie
lives there, you know.”
“Look at the darling white moccasins!” Hilary and June immediately
decided to purchase a pair for Mary, and several of the party bought
the bead-trimmed, leather moccasins before they left Montreal.
The ascent of Mt. Royal was made by easy stages, around a beautiful,
winding drive, past rocks and grassy slopes, interesting varieties
of trees and bushes, skirting a bridle path part of the way, till
finally the “look out”, “La Terrasse d’Observatoire au Mont-Royal”
was reached and a fine view of the city and river obtained.
“Just see me come up here some summer,” said Cathalina, as she
leaned upon the parapet next to Betty, “and read French while I live
in some French family and talk it all the time.”
When evening came, it was decided that in view of the long trip the
next day no outside entertainment should be sought.
“Let’s make it unanimous for bed,” suggested Hilary, who intended in
any event to see that June was early in the land of dreams.
“I vote with Hilary,” said Jean. “My brain can’t hold so much at one
time. I can’t remember all I’ve seen today!”
Helen, Evelyn and the three younger girls were with Miss West in a
suite of two rooms and bath. Hilary with June and Lilian, and Betty
with Cathalina were in adjoining rooms not far away. Like the girls,
Patricia dropped to sleep early, thinking about how perfectly
everything was going about the trip, and how lovely and sensible her
girls were. “And Cathalina has had so much experience in traveling.”
But if she had known what was happening that night scarcely the
proverbial forty winks would have been hers.
Waking early, and dozing uneasily for a while for fear that she
would oversleep, Miss West rose and dressed, wakened the girls that
were with her, saw that they were really roused and getting ready,
and went to call the rest. In the room occupied by Cathalina and
Betty she heard voices as she tapped on the door. “Up already, are
you?” she said, as Betty, fully dressed, threw open the door and
several somewhat excited voices began, “O, Miss West,—”
“Where did you find the pocketbook?” Hilary was asking Cathalina.
“Right there, on the floor.”
“And was nothing but the money gone?”
“That was all.” Cathalina was quite cool.
“What is this?” asked Patricia.
“Why, Miss Patricia, I seem to have been robbed last night,—but
don’t worry. I don’t mind, really, though I wish I’d spent it
yesterday!”
Miss West sat down on the bed. “Do you mean to tell me that your
room was broken into last night? Tell me all about it. Did you wake
up and see the robber?”
“Mercy, I hadn’t thought that we might! Wouldn’t it have been
terrible? There isn’t much to tell. You see we didn’t lock the
door—”
“I thought you girls always did that.—O, if I had only come and
tucked you all in!”
“It wasn’t your fault at all, and really we meant to lock the door
as usual. Indeed we do lock it, Miss West. You see, we were waiting
for ice water and got too sleepy to have any sense, I guess. We rang
and the boy didn’t come, and then we waited a while and were just
nearly falling over with sleep,—”
“After being out in the air all day,” inserted Betty.
“But your door should have been locked until he came.”
“Yes; we didn’t know it wasn’t. I put a tip on the table to have it
ready, and I finally crawled into bed with my Kimono on, after
ringing again,—and I woke up with it on this morning! The door was
wide open, my purse on the floor and the money gone. Please don’t
scold, Miss West; truly we won’t be so careless again.”
“My dear, I never felt less like scolding, and am only too thankful
that nothing happened to you and that you were not awakened or
frightened. But it is odd, Cathalina, for I thought of going in
again to see if you were all right, then I thought ‘Cathalina has
traveled so much that she will let me know if they need anything’
and went off to sleep more peacefully than usual! Do you remember
how much was in the purse?”
“About twenty dollars, I think. I have some besides, that wasn’t in
the pocketbook, and my check-book.”
“I was going to say that I can attend to all your expenses, of
course.”
“Shall I write Mother about it?”
“I wouldn’t send a telegram,” Betty suggested with a laugh.
“When you get safely into camp she will not worry. You can write the
details then. It is safely over now and will teach us all a lesson
in making sure that it is not too easy for some thief to get our
money.”
“It must be great to have your own check-book and money in the
bank,” whispered June to Hilary. “Is Cathalina awful rich?”
“‘Very,’ not ‘awful,’” corrected June’s elder sister. “Yes, you know
how much I have told you about their lovely home and servants and
everything. Cathalina has about everything she wants.”
“I will speak to the hotel people about it, but I fancy that we
shall never see the money,” Miss West was saying to Cathalina.
“Perhaps we can find out whether the bellboy ever came or not.”
There was little time for any detective work. Breakfast must be
eaten, bags packed, and an early departure made to the train.
Cathalina dismissed the matter, and by the time the party was on the
train bound for Portland everybody else seemed to have forgotten it.
Patricia had an occasional shiver whenever she thought of her
sleeping girls with their door opened by some prowler, but the
necessary arrangements of the present often most fortunately crowd
out the too vivid memory of some unpleasant occurrence.
“Here’s our last look at Montreal,” said Evelyn, as the train drew
away from the city. “There are two square towers of Notre Dame.”
“Goodbye, Mt. Royal,” and June waved her hand blithely. Too many
good times were ahead of them all for regrets.
“This is the Canadian Pacific bridge, I suppose,” said Rhoda, “that
we saw when we came down the river,—yes, there is the Indian village
that hasn’t any streets.”
“I’ve seen my last French sign, I guess,” remarked Cathalina. “It
was at the crossing. ‘Traverse Du Chemin De Fer’ was one cross-piece
and ‘Railroad Crossing’ on the other.”
They were comfortably settled for the all day trip to Portland in a
chair car and looked very serious when an official appeared to ask
them if they had bought anything in Canada. They began to open their
suit-cases or bags and told of their moccasins at once, but in their
sincere faces the most suspicious of custom officers could find no
guile.
“It’s the Green Mountains that we see first, girls, then the White
Mountains. The conductor said so.” Jean was looking at the map in
her folder. “And we’re not in the United States right away after
crossing the St. Lawrence.”
As Hawthorne’s Tales of the White Hills are usually read in that
department of school work known as “English”, these girls were quite
interested in finding, among post cards bought on the train, a
photograph of the “Great Stone Face”. “I hadn’t thought of it
myself,” said Patty, “that these are Hawthorne’s White Hills at
last.”
“This scenery is the most lovely of all we have seen,” said Lilian.
They had been watching the clouds floating about the hill-tops,
little cascades leaping down the rugged heights, pretty glens,
little streams, lakes and rocky cliffs. Yet beautiful as the scenery
was, no one could keep in a state of rapture all the time. At
intervals Cathalina read her French papers. Other papers and
magazines were passed around, or the girls chatted happily about
many things. It was a day to be remembered, and interesting to have
celebrated “Dominion Day” in Canada, this “glorious Fourth”, or most
of it, in New England.
“What do you think about it, girls?” asked Miss West of a few near
her, as they were nearing Portland. “Was it worth the trouble to
take the trip?”
“I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” cried Marjorie, and seemed
to express the general sentiment.
A sight-seeing trip in Portland the next day showed them its
buildings and parks, and Casco Bay with its schooners, sail-boats
and freighters of all sorts. On Congress Street they saw the home of
Longfellow, “next to Keith’s!” This struck the girls as particularly
funny. “‘From the sublime to the ridiculous’ both literally and
figuratively,” said Hilary.
The journey to Bath seemed incredibly short in comparison with the
long trips which they had been having. It was the Maine country,
with its buttercups, daisies, wild roses, evergreens, and the aged
rocks peeping out here and there,—and now they had arrived at Bath,
with nothing but a boat ride between them and camp!