LANDING IN CANADA
It was while we were still out to sea that I first realised what
Canada might be like, and how different from England. We had been
steaming for five days, and hitherto the Atlantic had seemed a
familiar and still English sea. The sky above, the air around, even
the vast slowly heaving waters and the set of the sun one might see
from an English cliff. But on this last day but one, which was a day
of hot sun, the sky seemed to have risen immeasurably higher than in
England and to have become incredibly clearer, except where little
white rugged clouds were set. Snow clouds in a perfect winter's sky,
I should have said, if I had known myself to be at home; yet the air
round the ship was of the very balmiest summer. We should never get
such a sky and such an air together in England, and we were all
stimulated by it and began to forget England and think more of
Canada. We wondered {16} when we were going to see the lights of
Belle Isle, and somebody said we should pass an island called
Anticosti, and we began to look out for Anticosti, and anybody who
knew anything about Anticosti was listened to like an oracle. Not
that anybody did know much--even those who had crossed to and fro
several times. After all there was no reason why they should, for
Atlantic liners do not stop there, and there is not much to be seen
in passing. Still we weighed the words of those who had passed it
carefully, and decided to see what we could of it so that we might
also be regarded as oracles next time we came that way.
Though we had not seen Canada, yet we had received a favourable
impression of it, which was lucky, because the next day, when we had
got into the St. Lawrence, it came on to sleet and vapour. We of the
steerage, who had brought up our boxes and babies almost before
breakfast, so as to be ready to land at the earliest moment, had to
content ourselves with sitting on them between decks (on the boxes,
for choice, but the babies would get in the way too), and watch the
little white villages and tinned church spires and dark woods of
French Canada drive past the portholes in the {17} mist. We should
like to have been on deck seeing more of our new home, breathing some
of its bracing air; but the rain was incessant. Heavens, but it got
stuffy too on that lower deck. Nine hundred of us in our best
clothes and our overcoats--holding on to bundles and kids, and
sweating. It got so stuffy, that I took the opportunity of crossing
in the rain to the first-class, and hunting out two people to whom I
had introductions. One was the Canadian Minister for Emigration, who
had already been over to inspect us in a paternal sort of way and
declared that we were 'a particularly good lot'--very different, he
hinted, from the sort of English emigrants who used to be shipped
over, and got Englishmen a bad name in the new country for years.
His gratification at our general excellence was so natural that I did
not broach the question of whether Canada's gain was England's loss.
I hope it was not. I suppose we can afford to lose even good men,
provided we are not going to lose them really, but only station them
at a different spot along the great road of the Empire.
The other person I was anxious to see was Archbishop Bourne, who was
going out to the Eucharistic Congress at Montreal. We {18} discussed
that extraordinarily lucid book of Monsieur André Siegfried, which
deals with the race question in Canada. The archbishop admitted its
value, though he thought it unfair in parts. He was assured, for
example, that the unsocial attitude of the Irish and French Canadian
Catholics towards one another as well as towards those of another
religion was fast disappearing, nor did he seem to think that the
Church any longer tended to frustrate enterprise by keeping its
members under its wing in the East. Many Catholics were going West
nowadays, and after the Congress he himself was going West in the
spirit of the times. Perhaps he was right about the _rapprochement_
of the Irish and French Catholics, though men on the spot maintain
that their unsociability is largely due to the fact that both have a
singular yearning for State employment and the employment will not
always go round.
It was still raining when I recrossed to the steerage, and it was
still raining when we got into the Canadian Pacific Railway dock at
about 5 P.M. I was standing beside the horse-breaker at the time,
and the first thing that caught his eye in Quebec was the shape of
the telegraph poles.
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'Why, look at them,' he said, 'they're all crooked!'
A little later, he commented on the slowness with which the
French-Canadian porters were getting the baggage off the boat. 'They
may have this here hustle on them that they talk of,' he said, 'but
I've seen that done a lot quicker in London.'
It was more loyalty to the old country than disloyalty to the new
that prompted the remark, in which there was perhaps some
justification. A Canadian who was standing by seemed to think so at
any rate.
'This is only French Canada,' he said, 'wait till you get West.'
Still we all of us had to wait a bit in French Canada anyhow. We did
not get through the emigration sheds till 9.30 P.M., and then there
was one's baggage to be got through the Customs after. Not that
there was much in that, the officials being most amiable. But we
none of us much enjoyed the emigrant inspection. It is necessary and
desirable no doubt, but we felt that we had been inspected pretty
often already on board the boat, and we had been up since daylight,
and we were hungry and miserable, and hot in the sheds and cold out
of them, and the babies fractious, {20} and everybody shoving and
pushing, and we felt like some sheep at sheep-dog trials which have
to be driven through pen after pen, and would go so much faster if
they only knew how, and the dogs didn't press them. However it was
all accomplished at last, and then the emigrants got into the
westbound train that was waiting for them. First and second-class
passengers had long since vanished in carriages to such abodes of
luxury as the Cháteau Frontenac and the rest of the leading hotels.
Now there were no carriages left. And we heard that a hundred people
at least had been turned away from the Château Frontenac, so full was
it; and since in any case we wished to start our Canadian impressions
from a humbler standpoint, we set out in the rain for a Quebec inn
which some of the Canadians returning in the steerage had told us of.
I suppose we had a good deal more than a mile to go through the rain
carrying bags, along those awful roads from the docks. I know
something about those roads, because I not only walked along them
that night, but next morning I drove a dray along them. I had gone
back to the docks to get my trunk which I had had to leave there, and
the dray was the only thing I could get to drive up in. Soon after
we had started {21} I said to the driver--a merry-faced French
Canadian--'Il trotte bien,' referring to the horse, and he was so
pleased with the compliment, or the French perhaps, that he handed me
the reins and let me drive the rest of the way through the stone
piles and mud that appeared to form the roads in lower Quebec. In
return for the reins I had lent him my tobacco pouch; and when the
horse leapt an extra deep hole, he would stop filling his pipe and
hold me in round the waist.
To go back to the inn--I suppose it was ten o'clock before we got
there. A few men sat smoking, with their feet against the wall in
the entrance room where the office was; and after we had waited about
for ten minutes or so, one of them told us if we wanted to see the
clerk we'd better ring a bell. We did so, and presently a youth
turned up and patronisingly accorded us rooms for the night.
'Is there any chance of getting a meal to-night?' we inquired,
somewhat damped by his unenthusiastic reception. (I may say that I
never met an office clerk in a Canadian hotel who did seem keen on
welcoming guests. That is one of the differences between the old
world and the new.)
'Yup, there's a café downstairs,' said the {22} youth, as he lit a
cigar and sat down to read a newspaper.
We went downstairs, and there in a narrow little room behind a long
counter which had plates of sausage rolls, under meat covers to keep
them from the flies, upon it, and little high stools upon which you
sit in discomfort to eat the sausage rolls quickly in front of it, we
found a small pale-faced boy who said 'Sure!' in the cheeriest way
when we repeated our question about food. Five minutes later he had
produced from a stove which he was almost too small to reach fried
bacon and eggs and coffee, and while we sat and ate these good
things, he gave us advice about the future. He evidently knew
without asking that we were emigrants from the old country, and he
supposed we wanted jobs. He recommended waiting as a start--waiting
in a hotel. Waiting was not, he said, much of a thing to stick at;
but there was pretty good money to be made at it in the season. Lots
of tourists gave good tips--especially in Quebec--and you could save
money as a waiter if you tried. He himself was from the States, but
he liked Quebec well enough. Of course it was not as hustling as
further west, and not to be compared to the States. If a man {23}
had ideas, the States was the place for him. There were more
opportunities for a man with ideas in the States than there were in
Canada. We asked him how much a man with ideas could reckon upon
making in the States, and he said such a man could reckon upon making
as much as five dollars a day. It did not seem an overwhelming
amount to my aspiring mind--not for a man with ideas. Perhaps that
is because one has heard of so many millionaires down in the States,
beginning with Mr. Rockefeller. But then again, perhaps millionaires
are not men with ideas themselves so much as men who know how to use
the ideas of others.
Having started on money, the boy gave us a lecture on the Canadian
coinage, the advantages of the decimal system, where copper money
held good and why--all in a way that would have done credit to a
financial expert. We thought him an amazing boy to be frying eggs
and bacon behind a counter in a small café: only you don't just stick
to one groove in Canada. At least you ought not to, as the boy
himself told us. Englishmen were like that, but it didn't do in the
States or Canada. A man should have several strings to his bow, and
be ready to turn his hand to anything.
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Refreshed by our supper and his advice, we adjourned to the bar which
was handy, and got further enlightenment from the barman there. He
was a French Canadian, very dapper in a stiff white shirt and patent
leather boots. Money was also his theme. He told us he made forty
cents an hour, and meant to get up to seventy-five cents pretty soon.
That was good money to get, but he was worth it, and if the boss
didn't think so he would try some other boss who did. It was no good
a man's sitting down and taking less money than he was worth. A man
would not get anywhere if he did that sort of thing. He certainly
mixed cocktails at a lightning pace, and all the time he chatted he
strode up and down behind the bar like a caged jackal. He gave me my
first idea of that un-English restlessness--American, I suppose, in
its origin--which is beginning to spread so rapidly through Canada.
In America I fancy they are beginning to distrust it a little. Too
much enterprise may lead to an unsettled condition that is not much
better than stagnation. Farm hands tend to leave their employers at
critical moments, just for the sake of novelty. Farmers themselves
are so anxious to get on that they take what they can out of the
land, and move {25} to new farms, leaving the old ruined. It may be
that in a newer country like Canada enterprise is less perilous.
That remains to be seen. We retired to bed at midnight, sleepier
even than men from the old country are reputed to be.
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