I GO TO THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA
The only literary at-homes I had been to before I went to America were
Edmund Gosse’s in Delamere Terrace, Louise Chandler Moulton’s in
Weymouth Street, and W. E. Henley’s in an old house in which he resided
at Chiswick.
I have written elsewhere how the Gosses used to receive their friends on
Sunday afternoons. Not many came, but those who did come were generally
famous in the world of letters.
Mrs. Moulton, on the other hand, often had a crowd at her receptions. It
was in her drawing-room that I first met Sir Frederick Wedmore, Mrs.
Alexander the novelist, and Coulson Kernahan, and Theodore Watts. She
herself was a charming poet, and liked entertaining poets. I met her
first at Sir Bruce and Lady Seton’s, at Durham House, which at that time
contained the finest collection of modern paintings in London.
[Illustration:
THE AUTHOR
_Drawn by Yoshio Markino_
]
It was fortunate that Henley’s friends were devoted to him, because he
was an invalid and could not get about. He was already a great power in
journalism. His paper, called at first _The Scots Observer_, and later
on _The National Observer_, had taken the place of the _Saturday
Review_, which was not at that time conducted with the ability of the
old _Saturday_. The men who gathered round him were very brilliant. I
forget what evening of the week it was that he was at home, but whatever
evening it was he kept it up very late, with much smoke and consumption
of whiskey; and the conversation was always worth listening to. Henley
was a magnificent talker, with a fund of curious knowledge, and he had a
knack of turning the conversation on to some strange kind of sin or some
strange kind of occultism, which was thoroughly threshed out by the
clever people present. He rather liked morbid subjects.
Edmund Gosse gave me introductions to H. O. Houghton, head of the
publishing firm of Houghton, Mifflin & Co., and he and Henley and
Katherine Tynan gave me introductions to various authors. But my most
useful introduction I had through my chief American friend of that time,
Ada Loftus, who made the London correspondents of the _New York Herald_
and the _Boston Globe_ give full-length announcements of my approaching
visit to America—as long as they would give to William Watson now. They
labelled me in those announcements the “Australian Poet,” and that label
stuck to me during the whole of that visit to the United States. They
asked Mrs. Loftus, I suppose, what I had done, and she told them that I
had written several volumes of verse about Australia. Be that as it may,
those friendly announcements resulted in so many hospitalities being
offered to us by American authors and literary clubs that we really did
not need our introductions, especially in Boston, where Mrs. Moulton was
waiting to welcome us, and where I had old schoolfellows—the
Peabodys—connected with most of the leading families.
But I did present the introduction to Mr. Houghton—when does an author
neglect an introduction to a publisher?—and he showed us innumerable
kindnesses all the time we remained in Boston. It was to him that I owed
the invitations from Oliver Wendell Holmes and Whittier, and
Longfellow’s family to visit them in their homes—inestimable
opportunities. We spent three months in Boston, seeing all the best of
Boston literary society and the University bigwigs at Harvard, and then
we went for a month to New York until it was time for the ice-carnival
season at Montreal. At New York, with Edmund Clarence Stedman, the first
of American critics, as a godfather, the hospitalities of Boston were
repeated to us. But this was not our principal visit to New York.
Our first trip to Canada was intensely interesting to us, because there
we were in a new world, where the temperature was below zero, and the
snow several feet high in the streets, and the ice several feet thick on
the great river, up which ocean liners come from spring to autumn. The
ice-palace was already built, and rose like a mediæval castle of
alabaster; in the centre of the city the habitants were selling their
milk in frozen lumps in the market; all the world wore furs, for the
poorest could buy a skin of some sort made up somehow. There were still
buffalo-skin coats in those days in plenty, at three pounds apiece, and
those who could not afford a fur cap to their liking, wore a woollen
tobogganing tuque, which could be drawn down over the forehead and the
ears, just as some of the younger women and the children wore their
blanket tobogganing coats.
It was a new world, where nobody skated in the open, because of the
impossibility of keeping the ice free from snow, and where skating was
so universal an accomplishment that in the rinks people danced on skates
as naturally as on their feet in a ballroom.
One soon took for granted the monstrous cold, learned to swathe in furs
every time one left the house, even if it was only to go to the post, to
wear thin boots, because they were always covered with “arctics” when
one went out, and thin underclothing because one’s furs were so thick
out of doors, and the houses so furiously hot indoors; to have double
windows always closed, and hot air flowing into the room till the
temperature reached 70° and over.
It is no wonder that ice-cream, as they call it, is a feature at dinner
in winter in a Canadian hotel.
Outside, all the land was white, and all the sky was blue. Wrapped up in
furs, people so despised the intense cold that there was not one closed
sleigh—at Montreal in winter all the cabs were sleighs. By day we
sleighed up the mountain for tobogganing and came back in time for
tea-parties; by night we sleighed to dances or picnics. The merry jingle
of sleigh-bells was never out of one’s ears; and everything was so
delightfully simple—it was always beer and not champagne—and every one
took an interest in Australia and Colonial poetry. The tea-parties were
generally impromptus got up on the telephone. Every one in Montreal had
a telephone, though it was only the beginning of 1889.
Lighthall, the Canadian littérateur, came to call upon us the very first
afternoon that we were in Montreal, and he introduced us to our
life-long friends, the Robert Reids, and the George Washington
Stephens’s. Mrs. Reid and Mrs. Stephens were sisters. Mr. Stephens, the
Astor of Montreal, shortly afterwards became Treasurer of the Colony.
Lighthall introduced us also to Sir William Van Horne, the President of
the great Canadian Pacific Railway, which led to important results. We
only stayed in Canada a month then, but that was sufficient to convince
me that I did not want to live in a climate where the cold was as
dangerous as a tiger. It was brought home to me in an extraordinary way.
I was out walking with Mrs. Reid’s daughter, coming back from a
tea-party one evening. We saw a drunken man lying in the gutter. She
said, “We must get a sleigh and take that drunk to the police-station.
He will be dead in an hour if he lies there.”
When roused, he was sufficiently coherent to tell us where he lived, and
we took him home. The cold was so intense that she found one of her ears
frost-bitten before she got home; she had gone out in an ordinary hat
instead of a fur cap, because it was a tea-party and near home. The
unexpected delay in the open air to rouse the man, and driving him home,
made her pay the penalty of risking a frost-bite. We knew that it was
frost-bitten, because it had turned as white as if it had been powdered.
The policeman took up a handful of snow, and rubbed it for her—another
act of ordinary good Samaritanism in Canada.
We went straight down from Canada to Washington to see the change of
Administration from President Cleveland’s regime to President
Harrison’s. The climatic contrast was strong; Washington was as warm as
Rome. Our arctics and furs looked simply idiotic when we arrived in the
station.
The change of Administration in the United States is invested with a
good deal of magnificence. All the important people in America, who can
spare the time, go to Washington for it. There were many functions
during our visit. We were President Cleveland’s guests at his
farewell-party, and went to all the Harrison functions. Mrs. Cleveland
had a delightful personality; she was very pretty, very elegant, very
gracious, a tall woman, rather suggestive of the beautiful Dowager Lady
Dudley, with brilliant dark eyes and a brilliant smile. Cleveland was
not a pleasant man to meet. When I knew him he was a very strong man who
had become very stout. Everything about him suggested power. His face,
in spite of its fleshiness, was very powerful. He had a deliberate,
rather ungracious way of speaking, and his silences, accentuated by
rather resentful eyes, were worse. But a man who starts to sweep the
Augean stable for America needs these qualities; and he undoubtedly
improved the tone of the party opposed to him in the State by giving
them an opposition which they had to respect. But he had no conscience
in foreign politics.
The most interesting house we went to was Colonel John Hay’s. Hay was a
millionaire twice over, and had been Abraham Lincoln’s private
secretary. He was one of America’s best poets, and no man in the country
was more renowned for his personal charm or his lofty character. He was
afterwards Secretary of State, and Ambassador to Great Britain, and
could have been either then, if President Harrison had been able to
overcome Hay’s rooted objection to office. And Adalbert Hay, the
American Consul-general, who did so much for captive Britons in the Boer
War, was his son.
At Hay’s house you met alike the most famous politicians, the most
famous members of the Diplomatic Corps, and the most famous authors and
artists in America. There we met all the most distinguished members,
perhaps I might say the leaders, of the Republican Party.
Washington will always be a bright spot in my memory for another thing.
Henry Savage Landor, the explorer, was turned out of his room because
the whole hotel was wanted for President Harrison’s party, and as there
was not a room to be had in Washington, he slept for the remainder of
the time on a shakedown in my room. Both he and I used to spend a great
deal of our time with our next-door neighbour in K Street, General
William Tecumseh Sherman, the hero of the famous march through Georgia
in the Civil War—a grand old man, with a hard-bitten face, but very
human. I was present at his funeral in New York; thirty thousand
veterans—“the Grand Army of the Republic”—marched behind the riderless
horse, which bore his jack-boots and his sword.
From Washington we went to New York, and stayed there till the heat
drove us back to Canada, where we had an extraordinarily delightful
holiday in store for us. Sir William Van Horne had invited us to go as
the guests of the Canadian Pacific Railway right over their line from
Montreal to Vancouver and back, and as we had a month or more to spare
before the time we settled for our journey, we went first of all to the
land of Evangeline—Nova Scotia—and afterwards across the Bay of Fundy to
the valley of the St. John river in New Brunswick, and thence to Quebec
and Montreal, where we were the guests of the Reids, and for a fortnight
of the Stephens’s, in their summer home on the shores of Lac Eau Clair
in the Maskinonge forest, and of Agnes Maule Machar at Gananoque on the
Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence.
This experience of Canadian summer life was an extraordinary education
in beauty. A more perfect summer could not be imagined; the sky was
always blue, the sun was always vigorous, and there was generally a
light breeze. We half lived on the water, since all Canadians near a
river or lake have canoes and can manage them with the skill of an
Indian. The bathing was enchanting: we could catch a hundredweight of
fish sometimes, in that land of many waters. The wild flowers and wild
fruits of the meadows and woods were as plentiful as buttercups and
daisies in England; it was a land of many forests, many lakes, many
rivers; mountains near or distant were always in sight.
Nor was this all. On the lofty shores of the Bay of Fundy and the rock
of Quebec, and under the “Royal Mountain” at Montreal there were dear
old French houses, built in the days of the Thirteenth or Fourteenth
Louis, and most of them intertwined in the romance of Canadian history.
What a lovely and romantic land it was! And we saw it to perfection, for
Bliss Carman and Roberts, two Canadian poets, were our guides
everywhere. In all my years in Australia I never had half the enjoyment
out of the country-life that I derived from those two or three months of
a Canadian summer.
The wonders of our journey had hardly begun, though the first sight of
the old fortress of Quebec towering over the St. Lawrence, and of the
historic Fields of Abraham, are events never to be forgotten.
Still, we felt that a new era in our lives was beginning on that night
in early autumn when we steamed out of the chief station of the world’s
greatest railway westwards on a journey which would not terminate till
we stood on the shores of English Bay, and looked out on to the Pacific
Ocean.
We were so anxious to hurry out west to the new land that we only spared
ourselves a few days at Toronto to cross Lake Ontario to Niagara, and
spend an afternoon and evening with Goldwin Smith and George Taylor
Denison. They presented such a contrast—Goldwin Smith, the Cassandra
whose voice was always lifted against his country, except when he was
among her enemies, and Denison, a descendant of the famous Loyalist, and
the leader of Canadian loyalty to England. Denison was the winner of the
Emperor of Germany’s prize for the best book on Cavalry Tactics.
From Toronto we had not far to go by train before we found ourselves at
Lake Huron, and took a steamer of the company, built like a sea-going
vessel, to cross those two vast lakes, Huron and Superior, to Port
Arthur. They look like seas, and have storms as violent, though they are
fresh water, and in Lake Superior, at any rate, you could immerse the
whole of the British Islands. From Port Arthur we trained to Winnipeg,
the city of the plains, where we only stayed a few days before flying
across the prairie—a limitless plain as broken as the Weald of Kent,
jewelled with flowers in spring, and with game fleeing to the horizon
when cover is short.
After three days of eye-roaming, we woke to find our view barred by the
long wall of the Rocky Mountains, like castles of the gods.
At Banff, in the Rocky Mountains, we were to stay to contemplate the
finest open mountain scenery conceivable, and at the Glacier House to
contemplate a glacier, a forest and a stupendous peak threatening to
overwhelm a mountain inn. The scenery between the two was finer than
anything in the Apennines, with its torrents dashing between mighty
precipices, and its pine forests sweeping like a prairie fire over
mountain and valley, and its background of heaven-piercing Alps.
We entered the Glacier House at a dramatic moment, for Jim, the sports’
guide from Missouri, had just finished pegging out on the floor of one
of the sitting-rooms a trophy of his rifle that took me straight back to
the happy hours of my boyhood which I spent with Captain Mayne Reid—the
rust-coloured skin of a mighty grizzly bear which had turned the scale
at twelve hundredweight. Jim the guide had on a buckskin coat and
breeches, much stained with killing or skinning the bear: the spectacle
was a most impressive one.
From the glacier we tore down the valleys of the Thompson and the Fraser
to Vancouver, then a new wooden town perched on a forest clearing with
the tree stumps still scattered about its roads, but one of the great
seaports of the world in embryo—Canada’s Western Gate, the realisation
of the dream of La Salle.
We loved Vancouver, because here we were in a town and country in the
making, with a glorious piece of the forest primeval preserved for ever
as a national park. For a month we lived there, going every day to see
the sun set over the ocean which divided us from the mysterious
Orient—thinking over all that we had seen of a country which is like a
continent, in that three or four thousand miles’ journey on the
newly-opened line.
Then one day a little old bull-dog of a Cunarder, in the service of the
great railway, ran up the harbour, and moored herself to the wharf
beside the railway station. A tall dark officer, whose voice I heard
across the telephone a few hours before writing these lines, was leaning
over the gunwale. He and our party smiled pleasantly at each other, and
he invited us to go on board. The litter of the Orient was about the
decks. Chinese seamen and Japanese passengers were talking the
pigeon-English of the East to each other. And we felt that here was the
opportunity for stretching our hands across to the East. I accepted the
omen, and we booked our passages to Japan—drifting on as we had drifted
ever since we landed at Boston a year before.
The stout old _Parthia_ was going to lie a week or two in port before
she turned her head round for Yokohama and Hong Kong, and we spent most
of this time in an excursion across the strait to Victoria, the capital
of Vancouver’s Island, a little bit of England in the West, with a
dockyard still in Imperial hands.
As we returned from Victoria early in November, we met, on the
steamer, Admiral Sir Michael Culme-Seymour, who was about to be
Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, on his way back from a
Big-horn expedition in the North.
“Where are you on your way to?” he asked me.
“Japan,” I replied.
“What now?” he said; “you must be fond of bad weather.”
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