apart, one stone from another--a few of these folk--typical of a North
American race that refuses to become assimilated 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 astonishing 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 title 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 spunk. 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 Honoré
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 grass-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 _impasses_ 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.
[Illustration: 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 assigned 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 cock 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 Dyke 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
shell sent to harass 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 fashion 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 sunshiny 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 ship'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 gods."
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
casements 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
* * * * *
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
Punctuation and spelling standardized.
Frequent inconsistent hyphenation not changed.